Terry Tempest Williams Quotes About Birds

Quotes about: Birds

• 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.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Prayer, Bird, Praying

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.149, Vintage

• Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn, and to sing at dusk, was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Simple, Bird, Joy

• Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Country, Wings, Ideas

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.84, Vintage

• I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Integrity, Names, Giving

  Terry Tempest Williams (1984). “Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland”, p.66, UNM Press

• The hostility of this landscape teaches me how to be quiet and unobtrusive, how to find grace among spiders with a poisonous bite. I sat on a lone boulder in the midst of the curlews. By now, they had grown accustomed to me. This too, I found encouraging-that in the face of stressful intrusions, we can eventually settle in. One begins to almost trust the intruder as a presence that demands greater intent toward life. On a day like today when the air is dry and smells of salt, I have found my open space, my solitude, and sky. And I have found the birds who require it.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Smell, Space, Air

• 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.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Daughter, Mother, Grief

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.184, Vintage

• I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Mother, Capacity To Love, Rivers

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.178, Vintage

• 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.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Writing, Bird, Soul

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.90, Vintage

• I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33”, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Letting Go, Mother, Art

• I can tell that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, how do we find refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge being flooded.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Mother, Cancer, Rivers

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

• The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Long, Imagination, Bird

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.21, Vintage

• I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. 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.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Song, Prayer, Believe

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.149, Vintage

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