Top Terry Tempest Williams Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Terry Tempest Williams Biography

Terry Tempest Williams (born 8 September 1955), is an American author, conservationist, and activist. Williams' writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah and its Mormon culture. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.

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Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear - of women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.

Creativity, Culture, Fear, Voice, Voices

I think community is a shared history, it's a shared experience. It's not always agreement. In fact, I think that often it isn't. It's the commitment, again, to stay with something - to go the duration. You can't walk away. It's like a marriage, only I think it's more difficult to divorce yourself from community than it is to a human being because the strands are interconnected and so various.

Away, Commitment, Divorce, Experience, Think, Thinking

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.

Breathe, Communion, Fully, Making Love, Sense, Time

Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one's own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.

Per, Stories, Structure, Style, Terms, Voice

I am interested and deeply curious about our need for a spiritual life, a life of greater meaning, and how we come to a more ethical view of life within our communities that is more inclusive than exclusive, one that is extended even beyond our own species.

Community, Extended, Greater, Life, Spiritual, Views

I think that what I was talking about was that as a woman growing up in a Mormon tradition in Salt Lake City, Utah, we were taught - and we are still led to believe - that the most important value is obedience. But that obedience in the name of religion or patriotism ultimately takes our souls. So I think it's this larger issue of what is acceptable and what is not; where do we maintain obedience and law and where do we engage in civil disobedience - where we can cross the line physically and metaphorically and say, "No, this is no longer appropriate behavior. "

Believe, Disobedience, Growing Up, Issue, Say, Thinking

Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind, as Vaclav Havel says, "an orientation of the spirit. " And I have faith; maybe more than hope, I have faith. I think of my great-grandmother, Vilate Lee Romney, who came from good pioneer Mormon stock. She always said to us that faith without works is dead, so I think if we have hope, we must work to further that hope. Maybe that is the most important thing of all, to have our faith rooted in action.

Important, Maybe, Mind, Mormon, Pioneer, Thinking

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.

Joy, Making, Making Love, Pain, Suffering

When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.

Hurt, One Woman, Speak, Woman, Women

How do we take our anger and transform it into sacred rage? How do we create a language that opens the heart instead of closing it? To bear witness is not a passive act. It's an act of consequence that leads to consciousness. It matters. I am curious. I want to know why. I was raised with a scripture that says, "The glory of God is intelligence. " And to me our greatest intelligence is following our instincts, trusting our intuition.

Heart, Intelligence, Intuition, Matters, Raised, Scripture

The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions: Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinion? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up, trusting our fellow citizens to join us in our determined pursuit-a living democracy?

Citizens, Democracy, Giving Up, Home, Offer, Trust

The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

Bird, Imagination, Living, Long, Place, Rootedness

I really do believe if there is hope in the world, then it is to be found within our own communities with our own neighbors, and within our own homes and families.

Believe, Community, Families, Home, Homes, World

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.

Choose, Creativity, Engage, Imagination, Like, Time

I love the interrelatedness of things.

Interrelatedness, Love, Things

I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me.

Appreciate, Taken, Writing

It is where we embrace our questions. . . . Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?

Attention, Listen, Mind, Offer, Opinion, Opinions

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.

Bodies, Faithful, Imagination, Life, Remain, Spiritual

We are animal. We are Earth. We are water. We are a community of human beings living on this planet together. And we forget that. We become disconnected, we lose our center point of gravity, that stillness that allows us to listen to life on a deeper level and to meet each other in a fully authentic and present way.

Animal, Community, Living, Planet, Point, Water

I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination that can take us into the future.

Extend, Humane Way, Imagination, Push, Thinking, Way

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