Terry Tempest Williams > Quotes

“This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“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.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“I believe every woman should own at least one pair of red shoes.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

“What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conondrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another?”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“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.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“There is no one true church, no one chosen people.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

“The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“The mind creates those things that exist.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“I am leaving this tower and returning home. When I speak with family, and comments are always the same, 'Won't you be glad to get back to the real world?'

This is my question after two weeks of time, only two weeks, spent with prairie dogs, 'What is real?'

What is real? These prairie dogs and the lives they live and have adapted to in grassland communities over time, deep time?

What is real? A gravel pit adjacent to one of the last remaining protected prairie dog colonies in the world? A corral where cowboys in an honest day's work saddle up horses with prairie dogs under hoof for visitors to ride in Bryce Canyon National Park?

What is real? Two planes slamming into the World Trade Center and the wake of fear that has never stopped in this endless war of terror?

What is real? Forgiveness or revenge and the mounting deaths of thousands of human beings as America wages war in Afghanistan and Iraq?

What is real? Steve's recurrence of lymphoma? A closet full of shoes? Making love? Making money? Making right with the world with the smallest of unseen gestures?

How do we wish to live And with whom?

What is real to me are these prairie dogs facing the sun each morning and evening in the midst of man-made chaos.

What is real to me are the consequences of cruelty.

What is real to me are the concentric circles of compassion and its capacity to bring about change.

What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conundrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are.
A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“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?”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“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.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand.

Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“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.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“The story of the Utah prairie dog is the story of the range of our compassion. If we can extend our idea of community to include the lowliest of creatures, call them 'the untouchables', then we will indeed be closer to a path of peace and tolerance. if we cannot accommodate 'the other', the shadow we will see on our own home ground will be the forecast of our own species' extended winter of the soul.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“Her body was rounded like earth. Stories. Breath. . . . Her eyes have been painted closed. I understand. To tell a story you must travel inward.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“Grief dares us to love once more.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

“There becomes little doubt as to why power chooses to support power. Rwanda becomes invisible once again. We have nothing America wants.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself.
We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country. . . . If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy.
The land holds stories.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“memory is the only way home.”
― Terry Tempest Williams

“[I]f you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.”
― Terry Tempest Williams