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To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
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Corona
California
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Power
Withhold
Openly
Honestly
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More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams
Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.
Terry Tempest Williams
I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.
Terry Tempest Williams
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
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
Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.
Terry Tempest Williams
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one's own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.
Terry Tempest Williams
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
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
I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.
Terry Tempest Williams
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
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
To engage in civil disobedience is to feel the abundance of courage, the gratitude for a democracy that still invites us to speak from our hearts, to act from our conscience and have faith in the consequences of moral action. Abundance is a form of consciousness.
Terry Tempest Williams
The climate change movement is a river overflowing seeping into every nook and cranny.
Terry Tempest Williams
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.
Terry Tempest Williams
We have to speak out now on behalf of our community and on behalf of the land and say they're the same thing and say No, we are not rolling over and No, this is not a corporate enterprise. This is democracy in the fullest sense and we must have regard and reverence and those are the cornerstones of a just society.
Terry Tempest Williams
It is important to remember all true change begins at the margins and moves toward the center. This does not make the climate change movement marginal, it makes it muscular, organic, with a true movement toward the center.
Terry Tempest Williams
Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
Terry Tempest Williams
I don't think of myself as an American I see myself as a human being.
Terry Tempest Williams
Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind.
Terry Tempest Williams