Quote

Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind.

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
Outcomes
State
Hope
States
Mind
Attached

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

Image
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.
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
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
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
Revolution is not something outside of us, but inside us, begging for our engagement every single day.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
To engage in civil disobedience is to feel the abundance of courage, the gratitude for a democracy that still invites us to speak from our hearts, to act from our conscience and have faith in the consequences of moral action. Abundance is a form of consciousness.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I would say I am at peace with the mystery of my mother's journals. Of course, I will always wonder, but isn't that the creative tension of living with uncertainty? By leaving me her empty journals, my mother has made herself very present.
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
...if we allow ourselves contemplative time in nature-whether it's gardening, going for a walk with the dog, or being in the heart of the southern Utah wilderness-then we can hear the voice of our conscience. If we listen to that voice, it asks us to be conscious. And if we become conscious we choose to live lives of consequence.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.
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
Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I wonder how, among the Fremont, mothers and daughters shared their world. Did they walk side by side along the lake edge? What stories did they tell while weaving strips of bulrush into baskets? How did daughters bury their mothers and exercise their grief? What were the secret rituals of women? I feel certain they must have been tied to birds.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
Terry Tempest Williams