Book detail: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book features in-depth conversations with Terry Tempest Williams, exploring her perspectives on environmental issues, literature, and personal experiences.
The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.
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“In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I don't think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“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.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“There are times we have to put our body on the line for what we believe, for the injustices we see even within our own families.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“If you waste water, you die.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“This is an incredibly creative time. It is a difficult time. It is a disparaging time. A time of cultural and global transitions based on the realization that the Earth cannot support nonsustainable practices anymore.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I believe capitalism will eventually be replaced by a communitarian ethic where the rights and care of all beings will be taken into consideration, not just the greed of a corporate few.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I really do believe if there is hope in the world, then it is to be found within our own communities with our own neighbors, and within our own homes and families.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“My activism is a result of my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse - to try to make sense of the world, to try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries of what is acceptable.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Home is where we have a history.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That is about community.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell that in many ways I know of no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because when you are so familiar, you know the shadow.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I write about nuclear tests in Refuge - "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." With so many of the women in my family being diagnosed with breast cancer, mastectomies led to one-breasted women. I believe it is the result of nuclear fallout.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“There are things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not just peculiar to Mormonism - it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our creativity.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear - of women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about - the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“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?”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I love the interrelatedness of things.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what binds us as human beings.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“What I mean by "An Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“When you are with a landscape or a human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think we have powerful role-models among us in the American West. Certainly the Hopis, a timeless civilization that understands sustainability and what that means about living in harmony, in tandem with the natural world. We have much to learn from them, and they will survive us, I feel certain about that.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think that it's too much to take on the world. It's too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination that can take us into the future.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“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.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“I still have great faith in democracy. I have great belief in the power of community.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams
“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.”
Source: A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams