Quote

Landscape shapes culture

Terry Tempest Williams

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
Writer
Corona
California
Landscape
Shapes
Culture

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

Image
There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox - are all acts of tenderness.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I remember as a child, my grandmother read to me Silent Spring. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be a world without birdsong.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Each horizon, each place holds its own evolutionary power be it the prairie or the plateaus, the mountains or the marshes at Great Salt Lake. For me, this is the nature of peace. Our task is to learn how to see it, feel it, hear it, and care for these places as our own home ground.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Pico Iyer describes his writing as intimate letters to a stranger, and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn, and to sing at dusk, was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
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?
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
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?
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
What is private belongs to me alone. What is personal belongs to all of us through the shared experience of being human.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
The mind creates those things that exist.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.
Terry Tempest Williams