429 Quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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

I think I must be worried all the time – maybe that is the other side of joy, you know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.

We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.

An individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.

Mother had one quilt square made by a friend of hers framed, and hung it in her bathroom, where she saw it first thing in the morning. When I asked her why this mattered, she said, “It represents how women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.

To acknowledge that which we cannot see, to give definition to that which we don’t know, to create divine order out of chaos, is the religious dance.

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.

I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don’t know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor’s clay.

I am not so interested in religion or dogma of any kind. It is too restrictive for me, too organizational, too hierarchical, and too tied up in power and being right. You call it a “rabid evangelism.”