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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

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Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
Writer
Corona
California
Country
Destroy
Livelihood
Real
Build
Digging
Made
Land
Typical
Time
Community
Paradox
Love
Story
Hundreds
Family
Cross
Stories
Miles
Westerners
Change
Crosses
Trenches

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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We forget the nature of true power. The power within is abundance. The power without is greed.
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I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.
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I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.
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Creativity ignited a spark. In that moment, I saw that art is not peripheral, beauty is not optional, but a strategy for survival.
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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.
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There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.
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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.
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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.
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Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.
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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
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If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.
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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
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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
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WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?
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I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a conspiracy against higher thoughts.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later.
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Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.
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The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.
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Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.
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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