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Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

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
Past
Animal
Compassionate
Human
Community
Rivers
Humans
Story
Forms
Must
Future
Plant
Life
Sense
Animals
Nature
Intelligence
Form
Rocks
Extended
Stories
Beings
Plants

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Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.
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Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.
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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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Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.
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I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
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Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
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Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.
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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.
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I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.
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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.
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I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.
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I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.
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We're human, this is our world, and I think we learn that that which is most personal is most general. And so, in a sense, we disappear into this larger world.
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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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A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity. House-dwelling tension. When I stand on the edge of the land and sea, I feel this tension, this fluid line of transition. High tide. Low tide. It is the sea's reach and retreat that reminds me we have been human for only a very short time.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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