Quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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 dont have children at all.

There are two important days in a womans life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.

Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.

words are much stronger than I am.

The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.

My mothers journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.

To be read. To be heard. To be seen. I want to be read, I want to be heard. I dont 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 withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer.

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

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 dont want to see. If we refuse to face our shadow, it will project itself on someone else so we have no choice but to engage.

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

We are wearing coats of trust. When one tells a story this is what happens.

Grief dares us to love once more.

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.

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

Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.