Terry Tempest Williams

“What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?”

“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”

“Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.”

“Grief dares us to love once more.”

“Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are.A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.”

“I am a woman with wings,' I once wrote and will revise these words again. 'I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings.' In a voiced community, we all flourish.”

“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.”

“What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.”

“When I said, “I am my mother, but I’m not,” I was saying my path would be my own.”

“I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?”

“To be read. To be heard. To be seen. I want to be read, I want to be heard. I don't need to be seen. To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones. Words have a weight to them. How you choose to present them and to whom is a matter of style and choice.”

“To write,” Marguerite Duras remarked, “is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.”

“The nature of living and loving is the act of reciprocity. As women, we are told that to be the guest is to receive. We are told that to be the host is to give. But what if it is the reverse? What if it is the guest who gives to the host and it is the host who receives from the guest each time she sets her table to welcome and feed those she loves? To be the guest and the host simultaneously is to imagine a mutual exchange of gifts predicated on respect and joy. If we could adopt this truth, perhaps we as women would be less likely to become martyrs.”

“There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.”

“This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.”

“I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out.”