Quote

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

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
Think
Specificity
Thinking
Abstractions
Life
Abstraction
Lives
Living
Become
Without

More quotes by 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
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
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
We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.
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
Our kinship with Earth must be maintained otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.
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
Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same.
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
What I mean by An Unspoken Hunger. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Lanscape shapes culture.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
We mask our needs as the needs of others.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
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 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