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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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Terry Tempest Williams
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: September 8
Author
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
Poet
Writer
Corona
California
Without
Hundreds
Done
Flowers
Thing
Photograph
Religiously
Life
Filled
Feathers
Flower
Shelves
Open
Locks
Words
Journal
Keep
Photographs

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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I wonder how, among the Fremont, mothers and daughters shared their world. Did they walk side by side along the lake edge? What stories did they tell while weaving strips of bulrush into baskets? How did daughters bury their mothers and exercise their grief? What were the secret rituals of women? I feel certain they must have been tied to birds.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Democracy is an insecure landscape.
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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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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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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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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Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.
Terry Tempest Williams
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We mask our needs as the needs of others.
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
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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
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As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development.
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
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Not everything is meant for all to hear.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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
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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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I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
Terry Tempest Williams
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My body is a compass - and it does not lie.
Terry Tempest Williams