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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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Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
Writer
Corona
California
Change
Inspire
Imaginations
Limits
Inspires
Create
Teamwork
Imagination
Collaboration
Belief
Shared
Community
Limit
Social
Creates
Shows
Despair

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.
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Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.
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I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.
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We write out of our humanity by writing through our direct experience. That which is most personal is most general, which becomes both our insight and protection as a writers. This is our authority as women, as human beings.
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This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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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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.
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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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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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I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle.
Terry Tempest Williams
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We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have.
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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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We mask our needs as the needs of others.
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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Landscape shapes culture
Terry Tempest Williams
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Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
Terry Tempest Williams
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To me, we are in the midst of such broad-scale destruction, both psychically and physically, that the only thing that can threaten the grip, loosen the hold, of economism, I believe, is a discussion of the sacred born out of our regard and compassion and intelligence for the earth and the creatures on the earth.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams