Quotes from 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.

No separation between the spiritual and the physical. It is all one.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.

The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by water, through time.

As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.

The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one's genealogy with the earth was to commit treason against one's soul.

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.

We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.

I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.

Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.

My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart.

A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors.

I come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to "the truth." The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.

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.

The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.

I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.

Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That is about community.

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?