Quotes from Terry Tempest Williams

Restraint is the steel partition between a rational mind and a violent one.

Where do I belong? You can't belong everywhere. Or perhaps we can if we pay attention to the paths of our ancestors. Perhaps this is what it means to be American. Bloodlines originate in storylines. Some people stay in place, others move on. But if we look back far enough, we are all interconnected, interrelated, through place and race and time. *

I am fifty-four years old, the age my mother was when she died. The questions I hold now could not have been comprehended when I was a woman in my twenties. I didn't realize how young she was, but isn't that the conceit of mothers—that we conceal our youth and exist only for our children? It is

Mother left us alone to enjoy our own company while she enjoyed hers and reclaimed precious time for herself. When she wasn't living her solitude, she was contemplating it.

The Greek goddess Artemis, whose name means bear , embodies the wisdom of the wild. Christine Downing, in her book The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine , describes her as 'the one who knows each tree by its bark or leaf or fruit, each beast by its footprint or spoor, each bird by its plumage or call or nest.

Inside. Outside. Freedom and constraint. Earthbound. Airborne. What we see and what is reflected back can imprison us. Refraction. Do we ever see anything clearly without our own reflection getting in the way?

I received my first tutorial on voice. Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

But what thrilled me most was the fact that millions of meteors burn up every day as they enter our atmosphere. As a result, Earth received ten tons of dust from outer space. Not only do we take in the world with each breath, we are inhaling the universe. We are made of stardust.

Unexpressed emotion will be expressed somewhere, somehow, inside or out, most cruelly as unconscious aggression delivered with a smile or a poisonous cup of tea

In 1850, 150 glaciers were recorded within the boundaries of Glacier National Park. In 2015, only 25 active glaciers remain. After decades of research, scientists have concluded that the glaciers for which the park was named could be gone within fifteen years as a consequence of the burn of global warming.

Miniature rock murals are everywhere. Who were these artists, these scribes? When were they here? And what did they witness? Time has so little meaning in the center of the desert. The land holds a collective memory in the stillness of open spaces. Perhaps our only obligation is to listen and remember.

There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not aw a secret, but as a prayer.

The world is already split open, and it is in our destiny to heal it, each in our own way, each in our own time, with the gifts that are ours.

How do we not fall into a perpetual state of despair? My father said to me the other day, We have to stare it down. IT being grief. IT being everything he can't control like age, the waning strength of his legs, or the loss of another son.

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

The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power

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

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.

For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we desperately wanted to say yes. . . . 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.

Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

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.

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.

Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.

A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don't want to see