Quotes by Conservationists - Page 3

A shadow is never created in darkness. It is born of light. We can be blind to it and blinded by it. Our shadow asks us to look at what we don’t want to see
Terry Tempest Williams
Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.
Terry Tempest Williams
There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer.
Terry Tempest Williams
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
To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.
Terry Tempest Williams
To be read. To be heard. To be seen. I want to be read, I want to be heard. I don't need to be seen. 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. Words have a weight to them. How you choose to present them and to whom is a matter of style and choice.
Terry Tempest Williams
My mother's journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.
Terry Tempest Williams
We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher--we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.
Phillip M. Hoose
The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.
Terry Tempest Williams
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Terry Tempest Williams
The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.
Terry Tempest Williams
words are much stronger than I am.
Terry Tempest Williams
Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.
Terry Tempest Williams
There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.
Terry Tempest Williams
It is not possible to satisfy women," a friend said. "We are disturbed if we have children too young. Disturbed if we have then later. Disturbed if we don't have children at all.
Terry Tempest Williams
If I have done anything, even a little, to help small children enjoy honest, simple pleasures, I have done a bit of good.
Beatrix Potter
Enchanted islands are hard to understand,' he said. 'I've always thought that. It worried me even as a child. The trouble is that you can never be sure where the enchantment begins and where it ends.
Robert Aickman
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
Rachel Carson
When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else's to shield our fear.
Terry Tempest Williams
We come into this world through women: a woman who is spent, broken open, in awe. No wonder women have been worshiped ever since men first saw the crowning of a head, here, legs spread, a brushstroke of light. We are fire. We are water. We are earth. We are air. We are all things elemental. The world begins with "Yes,"Changing women: we begin again like the moon. We can no longer deny the destiny that is ours by becoming women who wait: waiting to love, waiting to speak, waiting to act. This is not patience, but pathology. We are sensual, sexual beings, intrinsically bound to both heaven and earth, our bodies a hologram. In our withholding of power, we abrogate power, and that creates war. The Australian poet Judith Wright says, "Our dream was the wrong dream, our strength was the wrong strength. Wounded, we cross the desert's emptiness and must be false to what would make us whole.
Terry Tempest Williams
The mind creates those things that exist.
Terry Tempest Williams
The heart can see things invisible to the eye.
T.A. Barron
The strongest bonds are of the heart.
T.A. Barron
Every bride and groom in the history of civilization has gained weight after their wedding day. It is only a matter of time until archaeologists unearth a married caveman who's wearing a pair of old tux pants that were so tight he couldn't get the zipper closed.
Peter Scott
Not every woman is obsessed with shoes. But every woman is more obsessed with shoes than her husband is (although that's not too difficult to accomplish, since your husband has exactly two pairs--black shoes that are ten years old and barely broken in and sneakers that are so dirty they classify as a biohazard).
Peter Scott
You need to play to your strengths as a couple. Sharing is really awesome when you're messing around with Play-Doh in kindergarten. It's less awesome when you're adults and one of you is good at something and the other person sucks at it. So just let the more skilled person take the reins.
Peter Scott
Think of your husband as a house. You are allowed to give him a fresh coat of paint and change out the furniture now and then. But if you're constantly trying to pour a new foundation or replace the roof, you're in serious trouble.
Peter Scott
There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one's being. As I listened to Ian's news, all of Digit's life, since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, passed through my mind. From that moment on, I came to live within an insulated part of myself.
Dian Fossey
Artifacts are alive. Each has a voice. They remind us what it means to be human - that it is our nature to survive, to create works of beauty to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in.
Terry Tempest Williams
I have thought that the word America must mean different things to the people who live under its aegis. I would that for each of them it might be symbolized by one -- at least one -- memory of some aspect of unspoiled nature. America -- wide, far-reaching, insouciant -- has been the amphitheater for our civilization. I wish each of us could appreciate its vast beauty, and could see how far the elements of our civilization fall short of the sheer majesty of our America.
Harvey Broome
The wild is where you find it, not in some distant world relegated to a nostalgic past or an idealized future; its presence is not black or white, bad or good, corrupted or innocent... We are of that nature, not apart from it. We survive because of it, not instead of it.
Renee Askins
To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.
Rachel Carson
Civilization has provided no peace, no spectacle, no assurance to the human heart which can transcend the simple, ever-changing, matchless beauty and peace of the natural world
Harvey Broome
In Summer there were white and damask roses, and the smell of thyme and musk. In Spring there were green gooseberries and throstles [thrush], and the flowers they call ceninen [daffodils]. And leeks and cabbages also grew in that garden; and between long straight alleys, and apple-trained espaliers, there were beds of strawberries, and mint, and sage.
Beatrix Potter
How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, in the long run, will tell what kind of people we really are.-Laurance S. Rockefeller
Terry Tempest Williams
As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
Rachel Carson
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.
Rachel Carson
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
Terry Tempest Williams
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
Terry Tempest Williams
There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums.
Lydia Millet
I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?
Terry Tempest Williams
For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?
Rachel Carson
It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
Rachel Carson
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
Rachel Carson
All of us, all living things, have the potential to change.
T.A. Barron
The nature of living and loving is the act of reciprocity. As women, we are told that to be the guest is to receive. We are told that to be the host is to give. But what if it is the reverse? What if it is the guest who gives to the host and it is the host who receives from the guest each time she sets her table to welcome and feed those she loves? To be the guest and the host simultaneously is to imagine a mutual exchange of gifts predicated on respect and joy. If we could adopt this truth, perhaps we as women would be less likely to become martyrs.
Terry Tempest Williams
I am a woman with wings,' I once wrote and will revise these words again. 'I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings.' In a voiced community, we all flourish.
Terry Tempest Williams
The courage to continue before the face of despair is the recognition in those eyes of darkness we find our own night vision. Women blessed with death-eyes are fearless.
Terry Tempest Williams
At heart, women are creatures of darkness all the time.
Robert Aickman
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
Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper.
Terry Tempest Williams
Where wilderness can still be found, the ancientness of the land and the nobility of man's struggle emerge. Wilderness is vastly different from the clutter and clatter of much of our civilized world. In wilderness one experiences exhilaration and joy. In freedom and simplicity, in its vitality and immense variety, happiness may not only be pursued; it is ofttimes found.
Harvey Broome
Ensuring that our home planet is healthy and life sustaining is an overwhelming priority that undercuts all other human activities. The ship must first float. Our failure to grasp these fundamental tenants of existence will be our undoing. And one thing is for certain. No calvary is going to come charging to our rescue. We are going to have to rescue ourselves or die trying. Workable solutions are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is our elementary accord with Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms has to be revitalized and re-understood.The burning question is, How?
Lawrence Anthony
[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
Sir Laurens van der Post
[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.
Sir Laurens van der Post
The greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live.
James Oliver Curwood
Crocodiles are easy,' Steve said. 'They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.
Terri Irwin
Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.
Steve Irwin
This is not just primitive rural superstition; [juju] is practiced by all kinds of people, from illiterate herd boys to multi-dregreed university professors. If you don't understand the power of this belief, you will never truly grasp the rich albeit often incomprehensible spirituality of Africa.
Lawrence Anthony
And I came to understand, in a way I never had before, that books are truly the stuff of miracles. I even dared to dream that someday, somehow, I might surround myself with books from many times and many tongues...
T.A. Barron