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We're human, this is our world, and I think we learn that that which is most personal is most general. And so, in a sense, we disappear into this larger world.

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
Learn
Sense
Human
Humans
Think
Larger
Thinking
Disappear
World
General
Personal

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn, and to sing at dusk, was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
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 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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.
Terry Tempest Williams
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How do we remain faithful to our own spiritual imagination and not betray what we know in our own bodies? The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
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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I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the MacKenzie River. She said, This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have not returned. This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a place. And she sounded the alarm.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a conspiracy against higher thoughts.
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 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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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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Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand. Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.
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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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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To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
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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...if we allow ourselves contemplative time in nature-whether it's gardening, going for a walk with the dog, or being in the heart of the southern Utah wilderness-then we can hear the voice of our conscience. If we listen to that voice, it asks us to be conscious. And if we become conscious we choose to live lives of consequence.
Terry Tempest Williams