Terry Tempest Williams
- When Women Were Birds
Backward and forward: I have a friend who was once my sister. Now we hardly speak, but she often appears in my dreams. I think of her. The other day I found a beautiful letter she wrote. I miss her. Terribly. We were undone by a death; our relationship was its casualty. In deep pain, we killed each other with judgements so no memory of closeness would remain, and now I mourn another death, the death of a friendship, another loss, another wound, unspoken.
Terry Tempest Williams
- When Women Were Birds
In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wind. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness.
Terry Tempest Williams
- When Women Were Birds
I fear silence because it leads me to myself, a self I may not wish to confront. It asks that I listen. And in listening, I am taken to an unknown place. Silence leaves me alone in a place of feeling. It is not necessarily a place of comfort.
Terry Tempest Williams
- When Women Were Birds
It is winter. Ravens are standing on a pile of bones-black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean. It's what I do each time I sit down to write. 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?
Terry Tempest Williams
- When Women Were Birds
Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us... The women in my family didn't always agree, but it was in their company I felt inspired and safe.
Terry Tempest Williams
- When Women Were Birds
On the edge of the continent, looking west, we came to an understanding of the peace and violence around us. Power is the sea's thundering voice, the curling and crashing of waves. Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life. And life held in the sea is surface and depth, what we see and what we imagine. We cast a line, we throw out a net, what emerges is religion in the form of fish.
Barbara Kingsolver
- The Poisonwood Bible (p. 90)
And the rain poured down and I wondered, Are we lost right now without knowing it? It had already happened so many times in my life (my wedding day comes to mind) that I thought I was out of the woods, not realizing I'd merely paused on the edge of another narrow precipice in the midst of a long, long fall.
Barbara Kingsolver
- The Poisonwood Bible (p. 76)
I was struck through with my own wayward brand of reverence: praise be the lord of all plagues and secret afflictions! If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked his own socks off with the African parasites.
Nicole Krauss
- Forest Dark
But a foreboding thought cast a shadow over the rest, blunt and unadorned, and it was simply this: that for most of my life I had been emulating the thoughts and actions of other people. That so much that I had done or said had been a mirror of what was done and said around me. And that if I continued in this manner, whatever glimmers of brilliant life still burned in me would soon go out.
Nicole Krauss
- Forest Dark
Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured.
Nicole Krauss
- Forest Dark
He had rarely lifted his head above the powerful currents of his life, being too busy plunging through them. But there were moments now when he saw the whole view, all the way to the horizon. And it filled him equally with joy and with yearning.
William Cronon
- "The Trouble with Wilderness"
If living in history means that we cannot help leaving marks on a fallen world, then the dilemma we face is to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave.
