Quotes from Terry Tempest Williams

The 1973 Endangered Species Act has been more than 99 percent successful at preventing the extinction of species under its watch. Scientists credit the ESA for saving 227 species from going extinct.

The only space I see truly capable of being closed is not the land or our civil liberties but our own hearts.

Humility is born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves. The very presence of a grizzly returns us to an ecology of awe. We tremble at what appears to be a dream yet stands before us on two legs and roars.

I didn't want Mother to come … I needed to live my own life and not be inhabited by hers. But when she came to visit, we transformed ourselves into doves cooing and coddling each other as we walked and talked in the park for hours, Mother and I adapted to each other anywhere and everywhere each time we were together.

Democracy depends on engagement, a firsthand accounting of what one sees, what one feels, and what one thinks, followed by the artful practice of expressing the truth of our times through our own talents, gifts, and vocations.

The Reformation was a movement that broke the bubble that held the Middle Ages in place. . . . El Bosco painted his Garden on the threshold of this leap.

Our future is guaranteed only by the degree of our personal involvement and commitment to an inclusive justice.

I wish I was at p[peace now, but the desert has become my heartbreak. Perhaps that is the nature of deserts- to break us open, wear us down to bedrock.

Might we not be on the threshold of an ecological reformation?

In the open space of democracy, we engage the qualities of inquiry, intuition, and love as we become a dynamic citizenry, unafraid to exercise our shared knowledge and power. We can dissent. We can vote. We can step forward in times of terror with a confounding calm that will shatter fear and complacency.

The desert has its own currency and it is measured in water.

Freedom is a word like "love" or "health" that teeters on the edge of cliché until you don't have one or the other and you wish like hell that you did.

If ever there was a story without a shadow, it would be this: that we as women exist in direct sunlight only. When women were birds, we knew otherwise.

Devil spelled backward is Lived.

Beware of the charismatic wolf in sheep's clothing. There is evil in the world. You can be tricked.

The world is not a safe place. Perhaps it never has been, but it is still a beautiful place. This is the disorienting truth of the Colorado Plateau: We stand on the edge of a great erosion landscape. The silence before us translates into deep time. We look not simply toward a linear horizon but a curved one where the planet becomes a globe spinning toward change.

To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression believing there is nothing we can do.

Wolves howl in the bright light of the moon. Bison remain wild, not tamed. And on dark days, when everywhere we turn war is raging and violence around the world seems to be rising, a dozen trumpeter swans fly in formation over snow-covered peaks.

I love the concept of unity and diversity Ã¢â'¬Â¦ most decisions are based on a tiny difference. People say this was right and that wrong—the difference was a feather Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I keep scales wherever I am to remind me of that Ã¢â'¬Â¦ They're a symbol of my awareness of the distortion most people have of what's better and what isn't. LSR

I do not believe we can look for leadership beyond ourselves. I do not believe we can wait for someone or something to save us from our global predicaments and obligations. I need to look in the mirror and ask this of myself: If I am committed to seeing the direction of our country change, how must I change myself?

This is what our community is in need of now. Fire. Fire that wakes us up. Fire that transforms where we are. Fire to see our way through the dark. Fire as illumination.

In the desert, success is the understanding of limits. One false move and you die. You can't talk your way out of thirst. Bare skin burns. Face-to-face with a spitting rattlesnake, the only thing you have to negotiate is your escape. There are rules in the desert. Pay attention. Adapt or parish.

When one of us says, 'Look there's nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see.

Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder. This is our inheritance- the beauty before us. We cry. We cry out. There is nothing sentimental about facing the desert bare. It is a terrifying beauty.