Quote

The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.

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
Listening
Create
Shattering
Space
Complacency
Action
Unexpected
Transformation
Despair
Capable
Deep

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

Image
I think wherever we are, we can create an atmosphere of openness and trust, where women and those who feel marginalized feel safe to speak the truth of their lives.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Not everything is meant for all to hear.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
When I said, I am my mother, but I'm not, I was saying my path would be my own.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.
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
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
The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I'm outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer - in hibernation. I write with the bears.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Sometimes you have to disclaim your country and inhabit another before you can return to your own.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
When one of us says 'look, there is nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see'.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
There are things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not just peculiar to Mormonism - it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.
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
Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.
Terry Tempest Williams