Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams’ writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah in which she was raised. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.
She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.
Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books.
In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfictionand a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.
Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
“Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.”
“There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.”
“Roland Barthes says, “That which cannot be named is a disturbance.”
“We know the quality of another’s heart through her voice.”
“Once you know that you have a voice,” Louis said, “it’s no longer the voice that matters, but what is behind the voice.”
“Your voice is the wildest thing you own,” Brooke says to me. “And you’re giving it away. You can’t see it. Your obsession is blinding you.” He is angry. He is talking in shorthand. “You’re losing yourself.”
“A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see”
“The sin we commit against each other as women is lack of support. We hurt. We hurt each other. We hide. We project. We become mute or duplicitous, and we fester like boiling water until one day we erupt like a geyser. Do we forget we unravel in grief?”
“I have found what I need most to heal a broken bond is time together—the very thing I avoid is the thing most desired.”
“Not everything is meant for all to hear.”
“Finding one’s voice is a process of finding one’s passion.”
“Did I have the courage to forge a path”
“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?”
“When I look in the mirror, I see a woman with secrets. When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.”
“But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here.”
“Agitation gives birth to creation.”
“My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.”
“And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.”
“I wonder what would happen if you gave up your need to be right?”
“Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.”
“Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.”
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”
“To write,” Marguerite Duras remarked, “is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.”
“What else are we to do with our obsessions? Do they feed us? Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us?”
“When I said, “I am my mother, but I’m not,” I was saying my path would be my own.”
“CONVERSATION is the vehicle for change.”
“And all your Faithless doubts Will not destroy The rising spring In me.”
“Here is the world. It is not a safe place, but however frightening and bewildering life may become, we can survive our fears, grab them by the wolf ’s tail as Peter did, and make peace with the world.”
“Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.”
“Each of us has one. Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.”
“If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.”
“To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.”
“the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.”
“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 are much stronger than I am.”
“When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship.”
“We mask our needs as the needs of others.”
“It is not possible to satisfy women," a friend said. "We are disturbed if we have children too young. Disturbed if we have then later. Disturbed if we don't have children at all.”
“For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we desperately wanted to say yes. . . . When we don't listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don't, others will abandon us.”
“The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.”
“I was not rebelling by smoking dope or drinking, I was testing ideas. I was experimenting with voice, what I could say and still be heard in an atmosphere of prescribed truths.”
“What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?”
“My grandmother simply shook her head and said, "You know what you saw. The bird doesn't need to be counted, and neither do you.”
“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.”
“These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.”
“Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.”
“Myths have a way of bringing what is unconscious to the surface and putting a face on what we cannot see.”
“Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.”
“Respect is primary.”
“Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.”