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To hear something asks very little of us. To listen places our entire being on notice.

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
Entire
Places
Listen
Hear
Asks
Littles
Little
Something
Notice

More quotes by 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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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?
Terry Tempest Williams
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I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect too much of myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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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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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I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
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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Storytelling is the oldest form of education.
Terry Tempest Williams
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That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about - the patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible
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.
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