J.M. Williams Quotes

I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?

I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.

What I mean by "An Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial.

I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.

My family lives all around me. We see each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they split us apart.

Hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world.

Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That is about community.

I think I must be worried all the time - maybe that is the other side of joy, you know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.

I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep.

When I said, "I am my mother, but I'm not," I was saying my path would be my own.

It is where we embrace our questions. . . . Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?

We're human, this is our world, and I think we learn that that which is most personal is most general. And so, in a sense, we disappear into this larger world.

The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.

I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out.

When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.

I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.

I come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to "the truth." The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.

In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.

Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free.

We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.

I believe every woman should own at least one pair of red shoes.

memory is the only way home.

The moment Eve bit into the apple, her eyes opened and she became free. She exposed the truth of what every woman knows: to find our sovereign voice often requires a betrayal.

The choices and decisions we make in terms of how we use the land ultimately affect our very DNA. Environmental issues are life issues.

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

I write as a witness to what I have seen.

I love the ordered mind of history because it takes us out of the chaos, momentarily, and says, "Ah, so this is the story we are engaged in."

I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.

There are times we have to put our body on the line for what we believe, for the injustices we see even within our own families.

At the heart of Mormonism is a high regard for community. That is its strength. I have great respect for that.

If you waste water, you die.

I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home.

Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind.

Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.

Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.

I remember as a child, my grandmother read to me Silent Spring. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be a world without birdsong.

Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience.

Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.

It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.

I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.

In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.

Disappoint anyone… hell, disappoint everyone – but don’t ever disappoint yourself.

I don't usually experience that because there are few people who intimidate me, but Woody was one of them.

This is the kind of work I've aspired to my whole career.

I couldnt imagine my life being any more successful than it is now.

My children are 10 and three, and the longing and the need for them is incredibly powerful.

Also, if you're in a TV show that does turn out to be very successful, you then can do whatever you want to do in theater for a very long time.

I just love working with actors in general.