429 Quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the “I” it becomes an alchemical “we.” This is the sorcery of literature.

These valleys, these rivers- creased, folded, and pushed. What wisdom mountains house. My God- they are Gods. My God has feet of Earth. We are flickering moths in migration.

But what thrilled me most was the fact that millions of meteors burn up every day as they enter our atmosphere. As a result, Earth receives ten tons of dust from outer space. Not only do we take in the world with each breath, we are inhaling the universe. We are made of stardust.

I can’t imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn’t we?

People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand – what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for – Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.

I am of this place. Family is a place, and my family s located here, those who are living and those who have passed. I am am settled in the scent of sage, Mount Moran’s reflection at Oxbow Bend is more than a mirror of memories; it is the joy found in river otters, a reminder that there are places in the world we can return for peace unchanged.

I trace my genealogy back to the land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and place. Our genetic makeup is not so different from the collared lizard, the canyon wren now calling, or the great horned owl who watches from the cottonwood near the creek. Mountain lion is as mysterious a creature as any soul I know. Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?

Perhaps this is what our national parks hold for us: stories, of who we have been and who we might become- a reminder that as human beings our histories harbor both darkness and light. To live in the United States of America and tell only one story, from one point of view, diminishes us all.

I was not born here by my consciousness towards a land ethic was.