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I remember as a child, my grandmother read to me Silent Spring. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be a world without birdsong.

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
Remember
Without
Birdsong
Children
Incomprehensible
World
Grandmother
Silent
Spring
Child
Read

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
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Lanscape shapes culture.
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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
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Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.
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When one woman doesn't speak, other women get hurt.
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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.
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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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Not everything is meant for all to hear.
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I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love.
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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.
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Agitation gives birth to creation.
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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I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering.
Terry Tempest Williams
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To me, we are in the midst of such broad-scale destruction, both psychically and physically, that the only thing that can threaten the grip, loosen the hold, of economism, I believe, is a discussion of the sacred born out of our regard and compassion and intelligence for the earth and the creatures on the earth.
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I will never be able to say what is in my heart because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.
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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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The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.
Terry Tempest Williams