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Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?

Terry Tempest Williams

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Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
Writer
Corona
California
World
Perspective
Distinguishing
Judgment
Manipulated
Understanding
Modernity
Chance
Imagined
Beautiful
Context
Live
Curse
Without
Flesh
Real
Shadow

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What is private belongs to me alone. What is personal belongs to all of us through the shared experience of being human.
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It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.
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I don't think of myself as an American I see myself as a human being.
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When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.
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Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one's own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.
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To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.
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Perhaps the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.
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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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When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.
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Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.
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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.
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There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox - are all acts of tenderness.
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It is important to remember all true change begins at the margins and moves toward the center. This does not make the climate change movement marginal, it makes it muscular, organic, with a true movement toward the center.
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I think wherever we are, we can create an atmosphere of openness and trust, where women and those who feel marginalized feel safe to speak the truth of their lives.
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Each horizon, each place holds its own evolutionary power be it the prairie or the plateaus, the mountains or the marshes at Great Salt Lake. For me, this is the nature of peace. Our task is to learn how to see it, feel it, hear it, and care for these places as our own home ground.
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Our kinship with Earth must be maintained otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.
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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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How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same.
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Revolution is not something outside of us, but inside us, begging for our engagement every single day.
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Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace.
Terry Tempest Williams