Top 285 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Tempest Williams - Page 5

Our power lies in our love of our homelands.

I write as a witness to what I have seen.

The choices and decisions we make in terms of how we use the land ultimately affect our very DNA. Environmental issues are life issues.

I live in a very, very quiet place. I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I'm outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer - in hibernation. I write with the bears.

The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

We mask our needs as the needs of others.

I remember as a child, my grandmother read to me Silent Spring. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be a world without birdsong.

CONVERSATION is the vehicle for change.

I can tell that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, how do we find refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge being flooded.

This is an incredibly creative time. It is a difficult time. It is a disparaging time. A time of cultural and global transitions based on the realization that the Earth cannot support nonsustainable practices anymore.

I think we're skating on surfaces. I know it in my own life - and I think that is where this frustration comes in. It's not the place we want to be, but it's the place our society requires that we be. There is no fulfillment there. So we become numbed, we become drugged, we become less than we are. And I think that we know that.

The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.

Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience.

I know, that Rilke quote - "Beauty is the beginning of terror" - I think about that a lot. It's that realization that we are so small, and yet we are so large in our capacity to relate to the beauty of things.

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me.

Lanscape shapes culture.

Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.

Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

I live just outside of Salt Lake City in a place called Emigration Canyon. It's on the Mormon trail. So I feel deeply connected, not only because of my Mormon roots, which are five or six generations, but because of where we live. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not mindful of the spiritual sovereignty that was sought by my people in coming to Utah.

It is important to remember all true change begins at the margins and moves toward the center. This does not make the climate change movement marginal, it makes it muscular, organic, with a true movement toward the center.

It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.

I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home.

I can only say that I believe the Mormon Church is changing because the people inside the church are changing, particularly, the women. And if the women in the Mormon Church are changing, that means the men in the Mormon Church will change - slowly, reluctantly to be sure, but inevitably.

Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.

I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley.

I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.

Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind.

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

I think it could be argued that I am not heard, in the broadest sense. That is not my concern. My concern, a question really, is, do I have the courage to speak? If I speak I believe someone will respond. It then becomes my responsibility to listen to that person. And in listening, together we create a space where people can be heard. It's the conversation that I care most deeply about; this is the space I want to honor, respect, and protect. This is my faith in the open space of democracy.

Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision.

I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity.

At the heart of Mormonism is a high regard for community. That is its strength. I have great respect for that.

My activism is a result of my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse - to try to make sense of the world, to try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries of what is acceptable.

As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development.

I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love.

In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.

There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known.

John Cobb is saying that perhaps we are beginning to see that now as our greed goes completely out of control and everything is seen through money, through corporate power, etc., etc. We know it well. He asked the question, What will be the holocaust that takes us to the next era? - which he describes as "Earthism."

If you waste water, you die.

There are times we have to put our body on the line for what we believe, for the injustices we see even within our own families.

This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in."

I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there, what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations.

What is private belongs to me alone. What is personal belongs to all of us through the shared experience of being human.