Terry Tempest Williams Quotes
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I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley.
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The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power
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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.
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We find our voice, we lose our voice, we retrieve it, honor it, and hopefully, learn how to share it with others and stand in the center of our power. Translation is a theme. Fear and courage are a theme.
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We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.
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The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions: Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinion? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up, trusting our fellow citizens to join us in our determined pursuit-a living democracy?
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As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.
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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.
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Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.
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Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect too much of myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase.
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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.
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If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
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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.
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I write as a witness to what I have seen.
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There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.
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Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.
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We mask our needs as the needs of others.
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I don't think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being.
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These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.
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I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." It's there, we just forget.
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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.
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And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.
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I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.
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Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.
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I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in the world that often appears black and white. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.
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When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.
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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
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When I said, "I am my mother, but I'm not," I was saying my path would be my own.
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Finding beauty in a broken world is acknowledging that beauty leads us to our deepest and highest selves. It inspires us. We have an innate desire for grace. It's not that all our definitions of beauty are the same, but when you see a particular heron in the bend in the river, day after day, something in your soul stirs. We remember what it means to be human.
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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.
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