Terry Tempest Williams
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 and its Mormon culture. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth8 September 1955
CountryUnited States of America
beautiful hate loss
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.
daughter mother grief
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.
insecure democracy landscape
Democracy is an insecure landscape.
thinking our-world disappear
We're human, this is our world, and I think we learn that that which is most personal is most general. And so, in a sense, we disappear into this larger world.
library storytelling form
Storytelling is the oldest form of education.
spiritual believe mean
The creative process ignites our imagination, and I believe that that same imagination is what will propel us forward with issues of social change. I do think we have to acknowledge that we are a very capitalistic and consumptive nation, and that talk about conservation or issues of sustainability is never going to be popular with the dominant culture because it means checks and balances on an economy that is reserved for the dollar, rather than an economy that honors and respects spiritual resources and the right of all life to participate on the planet, not just our species.
lying doe body
My body is a compass - and it does not lie.
writing black-and-white fabric
I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in the world that often appears black and white. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.
littles asks
To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.
needs mask needs-of-others
We mask our needs as the needs of others.
age world encounters
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.
writing humanity protection
We write out of our humanity by writing through our direct experience. That which is most personal is most general, which becomes both our insight and protection as a writers. This is our authority as women, as human beings.
believe shoes red
I believe every woman should own at least one pair of red shoes.
art teaching land
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.