Quote

Creativity ignited a spark. In that moment, I saw that art is not peripheral, beauty is not optional, but a strategy for survival.

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
Creativity
Ignited
Beauty
Peripheral
Moment
Optional
Moments
Spark
Art
Sparks
Strategy
Survival
Saws

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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I live in a very, very quiet place. 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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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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I think wherever we are, we can create an atmosphere of openness and trust, where women and those who feel marginalized feel safe to speak the truth of their lives.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.
Terry Tempest Williams
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When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.
Terry Tempest Williams
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It is where we embrace our questions. . . . Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?
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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We mask our needs as the needs of others.
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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I don't think of myself as an American I see myself as a human being.
Terry Tempest Williams
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If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
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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When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.
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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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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Downwinders, meaning those people, individuals, communities that were downwind of the nuclear test site. During those years when we were testing atomic bombs above ground, when we watched them for entertainment from the roofs of our high schools, little did we know what was raining down on us, little did we know what would appear years later.
Terry Tempest Williams
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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
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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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