Quotes from Terry Tempest Williams

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend word of wounding without having these words becomg the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

Grief dares us to love once more.

When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.

I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.

If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.

I believe every woman should own at least one pair of red shoes.

There is no one true church, no one chosen people.

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. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will project itself on someone else so we have no choice but to engage.

We mask our needs as the needs of others.

To write," Marguerite Duras remarked, "is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.

I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

I wonder what would happen if you gave up your need to be right?

My spiritual life is found inside the heart of the wild.

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.

Not everything is meant for all to hear.

the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.

I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts... I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words.

The mind creates those things that exist.

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?

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?