429 Quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

Without manners, violence enters the room. Without the decency of imagination, narcissism leads.

I come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to “the truth.” The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.

Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside.

This is a landscape that should not be sold.

Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis of our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?

That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about – the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.

I think that it’s too much to take on the world. It’s too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods.

I believe that spiritual resistance – the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is the best retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.

If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.