Terry Tempest Williams
Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.Collection: Perfection
I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community.Collection: Power
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?Collection: Hurt
Home is where we have a history.Collection: Home
What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.Collection: Self Esteem
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.Collection: Teacher
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?Collection: Art
Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.Collection: Home
Agitation gives birth to creation.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Mirrors
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.Collection: Energy
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.Collection: Eye
Rituals are the formulas by which harmony is restored.Collection: Harmony
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.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Believe
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.Collection: Writing
I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.Collection: Taken
There is no one true church, no one chosen people.Collection: People
Lanscape shapes culture.Collection: Land
I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.Collection: Animal
How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.Collection: Spiritual
Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience.Collection: Stories
memory is the only way home.Collection: Memories
Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision.Collection: Cutting
The mind creates those things that exist.Collection: Mind
And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.Collection: Beautiful
It is where we embrace our questions. . . . Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?Collection: Mind
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.Collection: Lakes
Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free.Collection: Moving
I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.Collection: Time
Storytelling is the oldest form of education.Collection: Library
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.Collection: Betrayal
Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.Collection: Together
People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand--what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for--Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.Collection: People
I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Writing
For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies. We are animal. We are Earth. We are water. We are a community of human beings living on this planet together. And we forget that. We become disconnected, we lose our center point of gravity, that stillness that allows us to listen to life on a deeper level and to meet each other in a fully authentic and present way.Collection: Lying
The human heart is the first home of democracy.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Integrity
We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.Collection: Trying
Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.Collection: Soul
If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.Collection: Men
Wherever we are, we can call for and create these kinds of settings for authentic dialogue. This is the seedbed of social change. In a voiced community, we all flourish. But it's not easy. Revolutionary patience and persistence is required. It can be messy, it is unpredictable, and change, especially structural change takes time - time and leadership and the will of an engaged community. What is needed? In a word, courage.Collection: Persistence
Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.Collection: Community