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Landscape shapes culture

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
Culture
Landscape
Shapes

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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Sometimes you have to disclaim your country and inhabit another before you can return to your own.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.
Terry Tempest Williams
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In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.
Terry Tempest Williams
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We mask our needs as the needs of others.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Agitation gives birth to creation.
Terry Tempest Williams
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What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
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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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 birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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What I mean by An Unspoken Hunger. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by the constant denial.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.
Terry Tempest Williams