429 Quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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.

To me, we are in the midst of such broad-scale destruction, both psychically and physically, that the only thing that can threaten the grip, loosen the hold, of economism, I believe, is a discussion of the sacred born out of our regard and compassion and intelligence for the earth and the creatures on the earth.

I believe capitalism will eventually be replaced by a communitarian ethic where the rights and care of all beings will be taken into consideration, not just the greed of a corporate few.

I write about nuclear tests in Refuge - "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." With so many of the women in my family being diagnosed with breast cancer, mastectomies led to one-breasted women. I believe it is the result of nuclear fallout.

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

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?

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.

I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a place. And she sounded the alarm.

To me, writing is about how we see. The writers I want to read teach me how to see-see the world differently. In my writing there is no separation between how I observe the world and how I write the world. We write through our eyes. We write through our body. We write out of what we know.