Terry Tempest Williams Quotes

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.

Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

If wanted to play a sport, I played a sport. If I wanted to do things that many girls born in 1950 didn't do, I did it.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.

While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.

I think that's the great thing, ya' know, that women can do anything that they want now.

Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman.

Growing up in the '50s and being in the '60s, in that revolutionary time space, I thought freedom was what I was looking for. Slowly but surely, it became clear that the last thing I was interested in was freedom. Because if you're going to be free, you have to be free from something.

I am not convinced the truth can make men free, but I believe it a beginning.

I want to hear an alternative viewpoint, and I don't want girls to be defanged and declawed and pretty and mute.

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Women today have the keys to the doors which have been barred against them and they will open them without asking consent.

The idea of perfect womanhood is perfect independence.

We are tired of having a 'sphere' doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is 'unwomanly'. We want to be natural just for a change … we must be ourselves at all risks.

I think women want freedom. They want to be empowered. They want hope. They want love; they want all the things that I want, and I'm not afraid to say those things and act on them, and I think that's why they identify with me.

I try to be free. The women also must be free.

Women feel empowered when they can do the things that are supposed to be only for men, you know? It breaks boundaries, it's liberating, and it's empowering when you feel like, 'Well, I can do that, too.'

My earliest memory of freedom was when I was about 14 and I stopped caring what people thought about me! I was so free and in charge! That whole year I was exploring myself, and I was so 'free' that I got sent away to boarding school.

I have a sense of mission in a way. I've always worked on being free, as a woman and as an artist.

I don't know what I'm going to end up doing, but its definitely in the right direction for freedom and truth.

I knew I wasn't born to be caged and chained up.

A woman should be allowed to be whoever and whatever she wants to be and she should be respected for that.

We gotta break these double-standards and get women to loosen up a bit. We gotta show them that we can do what we want to do how we want to do it. If someone doesn't like it, they can get to stepping.