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Democracy is an insecure landscape.

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
Insecure
Landscape
Democracy

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I can only say that I believe the Mormon Church is changing because the people inside the church are changing, particularly, the women. And if the women in the Mormon Church are changing, that means the men in the Mormon Church will change - slowly, reluctantly to be sure, but inevitably.
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Lanscape shapes culture.
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It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak of her relationship to these beings for 20 years.
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I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.
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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.
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I take a deep breath and sidestep my fear and begin speaking from the place where beauty and bravery meet--within the chambers of a quivering heart.
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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
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I think direct political action, civil disobedience, in particular, is something to be taken very seriously.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace.
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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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Our family has made its livelihood from the land, digging trenches for hundreds of miles cross-country. You could say this is a real paradox, to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time. This is a typical story of Westerners, how we build community through change.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit.
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?
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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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If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.
Terry Tempest Williams
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When one of us says 'look, there is nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see'.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I would say I am at peace with the mystery of my mother's journals. Of course, I will always wonder, but isn't that the creative tension of living with uncertainty? By leaving me her empty journals, my mother has made herself very present.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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