Quote

The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.

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
Pain
Making
Ends
Someone
Feel
Paradoxical
Feels
Response
Love
Joy
Suffering

More quotes by 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
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 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
Image
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.
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
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 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
The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
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
Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?
Terry Tempest Williams
Image
A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity. House-dwelling tension. When I stand on the edge of the land and sea, I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition. High tide. Low tide. It is the sea's reach and retreat that reminds me we have been human for only a very short time.
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
To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.
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 take a deep breath and sidestep my fear and begin speaking from the place where beauty and bravery meet--within the chambers of a quivering heart.
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