429 Quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.

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.

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.

We write out of our humanity by writing through our direct experience. That which is most personal is most general, which becomes both our insight and protection as a writers. This is our authority as women, as human beings.

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

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.

Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.

What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.

memory is the only way home.