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When I said, "I am my mother, but I'm not," I was saying my path would be my own.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Each voice is distinct and has something to say. Each voice deserves to be heard. But it requires the act of listening.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love.
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When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I don't think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I can only say that I believe the Mormon Church is changing because the people inside the church are changing, particularly, the women. And if the women in the Mormon Church are changing, that means the men in the Mormon Church will change - slowly, reluctantly to be sure, but inevitably.
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about - the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible
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A mother and daughter are an edge.
Edges are ecotones, transitional zones,
places of danger or opportunity.
House-dwelling tension.
When I stand on the edge of the land and sea,
I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition.
High tide. Low tide.
It is the sea's reach and retreat
that reminds me
we have been human
for only a very short time.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
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I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other. What we perceive as non- human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship with us.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one's genealogy with the earth was to commit treason against one's soul.
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The sin we commit against each other as women is lack of support. We hurt. We hurt each other. We hide. We project. We become mute or duplicitous, and we fester like boiling water until one day we erupt like a geyser. Do we forget we unravel in grief?
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I think community is a shared history, it's a shared experience. It's not always agreement. In fact, I think that often it isn't. It's the commitment, again, to stay with something - to go the duration. You can't walk away. It's like a marriage, only I think it's more difficult to divorce yourself from community than it is to a human being because the strands are interconnected and so various.
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I think that the only thing that can bring us into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the source of our power lies.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
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Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Terry Tempest Williams
Born:
September 8, 1955
(age 68)
Bio:
Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist, and activist. Williams' writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah and its Mormon culture.
Known for:
The Hour Of Land (2016)
An Unspoken Hunger (1994)
Most used words:
faith
story
life
place
live
living
belief
suffering
love
birds
human
holy
write
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