Terry Tempest Williams Writing Quotations

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.

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.

When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.

I write as a witness to what I have seen.

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

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.

I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.

I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

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.

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, “Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.

I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the "I" it becomes an alchemical "we." This is the sorcery of literature.

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.

To me, writing is about how we see. The writers I want to read teach me how to see-see the world differently. In my writing there is no separation between how I observe the world and how I write the world. We write through our eyes. We write through our body. We write out of what we know.

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.

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 know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love.

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.

The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.

I appreciate all of the unexpected places, internal and external, that my writing has taken me.

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.

I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.

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

When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.