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Whatever artistry may occur within the manuscript, the magic happens for me in the last draft. Whatever I have been resistant to say must finally be said. In the end, I see where my pencil has been leading me.

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
Must
Magic
Manuscripts
Within
Artistry
Whatever
Pencil
Lasts
Draft
Last
Pencils
Happens
Occur
Ends
Leading
Resistant
May
Finally
Manuscript

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I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.
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Not everything is meant for all to hear.
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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.
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We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.
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Despair shows us the limit of our imagination. Imaginations shared create collaboration, collaboration creates community, and community inspires social change.
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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.
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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.
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Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives.
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Stories have the power to create social change and inspire community.
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Agitation gives birth to creation.
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I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle.
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We are aching to come together and I think it has little to do with liberal or conservative discourse. I think it has to do with increasing disconnection with what is real and soul-serving.
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If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?
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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.
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In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.
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