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

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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I love the interrelatedness of things.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.
Terry Tempest Williams
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As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I think that it's too much to take on the world. It's too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The question I'm constantly asking myself is: what are we afraid of? I think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of growth.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The climate change movement is a river overflowing seeping into every nook and cranny.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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?
Terry Tempest Williams
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I take a deep breath and sidestep my fear and begin speaking from the place where beauty and bravery meet--within the chambers of a quivering heart.
Terry Tempest Williams
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If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
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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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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