Top 285 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Tempest Williams - Page 2

Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.

I think that what I was talking about was that as a woman growing up in a Mormon tradition in Salt Lake City, Utah, we were taught - and we are still led to believe - that the most important value is obedience. But that obedience in the name of religion or patriotism ultimately takes our souls. So I think it's this larger issue of what is acceptable and what is not; where do we maintain obedience and law and where do we engage in civil disobedience - where we can cross the line physically and metaphorically and say, "No, this is no longer appropriate behavior."

To me, writing is about how we see. The writers I want to read teach me how to see-see the world differently. In my writing there is no separation between how I observe the world and how I write the world. We write through our eyes. We write through our body. We write out of what we know.

Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.

If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.

To hold silence and to be silenced are two very different experiences. And so another theme emerges, that of light and shadow. When we share our voice, who benefits? When we withhold, who benefits? And what are the consequences and costs of both?

Abundance is an expansion of energy. Abundance is a form of gratitude, a generosity, a modesty, a bow toward others - what we can give, what we can share, rather than what we can take.

Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.

What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.

An individual doesn't get cancer, a family does.

I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.

The sin we commit against each other as women is lack of support. We hurt. We hurt each other. We hide. We project. We become mute or duplicitous, and we fester like boiling water until one day we erupt like a geyser. Do we forget we unravel in grief?

If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.

A friend of mine said to me not long ago, "Terry you are married to sorrow." I looked at him and said, "No, I am not married to sorrow, I just choose not to look away." To not avert our eyes to suffering is to trust the power of presence. Joy emerges through suffering. Suffering is a component of joy. Whether we are sitting with a loved one dying or witnessing dolphins side-by-side watching the oil burning in the Gulf of Mexico, to be present with the world is to be alive. I think of Rilke once again, "Beauty is the beginning of terror." We can breathe our way toward courage.

I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.

We forget the nature of true power. The power within is abundance. The power without is greed.

Each horizon, each place holds its own evolutionary power be it the prairie or the plateaus, the mountains or the marshes at Great Salt Lake. For me, this is the nature of peace. Our task is to learn how to see it, feel it, hear it, and care for these places as our own home ground.

Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life.

Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.

I believe that when we are fully present, we not only live well, we live well for others.

I can tell that the Greater Yellowstone from the Tetons, to the Lamar Valley where wolves howl and grizzlies roam, acts as my spine, my range of memory that ties me to landscape of Other. And that the ocean from the rocky coast of Maine, to the Florida everglades, to the looming cliffs at Big Sur, sustain me, remind me we are nothing without salt water, wind, and waves.

I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.

I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.

We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.

The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.

When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel.

Rituals are the formulas by which harmony is restored.

John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

How do we take our anger and transform it into sacred rage? How do we create a language that opens the heart instead of closing it? To bear witness is not a passive act. It's an act of consequence that leads to consciousness. It matters. I am curious. I want to know why. I was raised with a scripture that says, "The glory of God is intelligence." And to me our greatest intelligence is following our instincts, trusting our intuition.

The human heart is the first home of democracy.

Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.

The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

When Pico [Iyer] talks about home being a place of isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" - a body of water than no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox.

I am not so interested in religion or dogma of any kind. It is too restrictive for me, too organizational, too hierarchical, and too tied up in power and being right. You call it a "rabid evangelism."

Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.

There are different qualities of silence. There's the silence that sustains us, as women, that nourishes us, the silence where I believe our true voice, our authentic voice, dwells. But there's also the silence that censors us, that tells us what we have to say does not want to be heard, should not be heard, has no value. And that if we speak, it will be at our own peril. This kind of silence is deadly. This kind of silence is deadening to who we are as women. And when a woman is silenced, the world is silenced. When a woman speaks, there is an opening.

When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.

Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace.

Agitation gives birth to creation.

I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.

I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle.

Grief dares us to love once more.

The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity. House-dwelling tension. When I stand on the edge of the land and sea, I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition. High tide. Low tide. It is the sea's reach and retreat that reminds me we have been human for only a very short time.

When I look in the mirror, I see a woman with secrets. When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.

When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.

I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among . . . then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home . . . If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put . . . then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.

Landscape shapes culture

But, today, the idea of faith returns to me. Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.

Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.

I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.

I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?

The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one's genealogy with the earth was to commit treason against one's soul.

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, “Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find. For me, we find this beauty through relationships, with people in place with other species. Integrity is the word that comes to mind. Integrity and presence.

I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community.

The creative process ignites our imagination, and I believe that that same imagination is what will propel us forward with issues of social change. I do think we have to acknowledge that we are a very capitalistic and consumptive nation, and that talk about conservation or issues of sustainability is never going to be popular with the dominant culture because it means checks and balances on an economy that is reserved for the dollar, rather than an economy that honors and respects spiritual resources and the right of all life to participate on the planet, not just our species.