Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

I knew my ways were unfulfilling. I chased power, pleasure, possessions, something satisfying. I knew I kept getting let down. I knew it was insanity, and I was never going to find fulfillment, but I didn't know what else to look for.

Thinking doesn't pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you.

I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it's gained you take no pleasure in it.

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.

I had turned into a trophy wife - and I sucked at it. I wasn't detail-oriented enough to maintain a perfect house or be a perfect hostess. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn't interested in Botox or makeup or reducing the appearance of the scars from my C-sections.

If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you

I was at my most miserable when I had everything I ever wanted.

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.

To be and to be creative are synonymous. It is impossible to be and not to be creative. But that impossible thing has happened, that ugly phenomenon has happened, because all your creative sources have been plugged, blocked, destroyed, and your whole energy has been forced into some activity that the society thinks is going to pay.

I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.

The first twenty years of my life were wasted. I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.

The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.

Countries like ours are full of people who have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it. . . it aches!

Even in this world where you’re getting everything you need and having this nice life, there’s still loneliness and longing and disconnection.

I'm just kind of sick of music. I don't know what I want to do. It's not that I feel suicidal or anything, but I just want to end this life. I just want to be somebody else now. Sometimes I feel like that. You always think, "If I just cut my hair really short and dye it brown and put on a little goatee, no one would know it was me, and I could..."

You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me.

Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters of life begin when you get what you want.

Selling your life to sit in a box and work for a machine. An uncaring machine that demands productivity that doesn't understand you and doesn't want to understand you... There's no natural behaviour. Everyone is wearing clothes they don't want to wear. Everybody is showing up and doing something they don't want to do. They have no connection to it. That's the problem with our society.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

The more desires you have, the more misery you will create for yourself. Misery is a consequence of desiring - and you go on desiring. In fact, you think that if your desires are fulfilled your miseries will disappear. In the first place they are never fulfilled; in the second place, if they are fulfilled, nothing is fulfilled by their fulfillment. You remain as empty as you have always been - or even more, because up to now you were occupied with a certain desire; now even that is fulfilled. A deep deep emptiness comes to you.

Most orgies that you go to, I have found, most of it is sad. All that wildness, all those laughs were like the shining silver and gold paper on packages, but there was nothing inside.

You see the lighted windows and what you want to think is that there may be many interesting stories behind them, but what you know is that really there are just dull, dull souls, mere consumers of food, who think their instincts are emotions and their tiny lives of more account than a whisper of wind.

My comfortable existence is reduced to a shallow meaningless party.