Quote

Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.

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
Land
Sand
Dusty
Four
Revolutionary
Reservations
Art
Desert
Tank
Like
Slow
Tail
Fenced
Patience
Tanks
Tortoise
Based
Tails
Tortoises
Teaching
Prisoner
Reservation
Steps
Locked
Dragging

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We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.
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If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
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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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There are two important days in a woman's life: the day she is born and the day she finds out why.
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I have a sequence to my creative life. In spring and fall, I am above ground and commit to community. In the summer, I'm outside. It is a time for family. And in the winter, I am underground. Home. This is when I do my work as a writer - in hibernation. I write with the bears.
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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.
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I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.
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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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The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
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But, today, the idea of faith returns to me. Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.
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Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
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We mask our needs as the needs of others.
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The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.
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I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a conspiracy against higher thoughts.
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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.
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The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.
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When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.
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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
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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.
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Landscape shapes culture
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