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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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Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
Writer
Corona
California
Meet
Quivering
Deep
Chambers
Beauty
Chamber
Within
Bravery
Fear
Breath
Place
Breaths
Take
Speaking
Heart
Begin
Sidestep

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
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I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.
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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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As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development.
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How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
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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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Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.
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Pico Iyer describes his writing as intimate letters to a stranger, and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration.
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This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
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What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.
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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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I believe every woman should own at least one pair of red shoes.
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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 think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.
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The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.
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My body is a compass - and it does not lie.
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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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Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.
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Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.
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I would say I am at peace with the mystery of my mother's journals. Of course, I will always wonder, but isn't that the creative tension of living with uncertainty? By leaving me her empty journals, my mother has made herself very present.
Terry Tempest Williams