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Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.

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
Open
Predictable
Words
Prey
Fall
Sentimental
Become
Pull
Must
Otherwise
Writing
Questions
Polemic
Good
Stay
Polemics
Simply
Stale

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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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We have to speak out now on behalf of our community and on behalf of the land and say they're the same thing and say No, we are not rolling over and No, this is not a corporate enterprise. This is democracy in the fullest sense and we must have regard and reverence and those are the cornerstones of a just society.
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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In the early days of the Mormon Church, stewardship toward the land was a priority. It was a matter of survival in the desert.
Terry Tempest Williams
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What is private belongs to me alone. What is personal belongs to all of us through the shared experience of being human.
Terry Tempest Williams
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If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.
Terry Tempest Williams
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My voice is born repeatedly in the fields of uncertainty.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The Japanese have a word - aware - which, in my understanding is, again, that full range - both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other. And I really feel that.
Terry Tempest Williams
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I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Democracy is an insecure landscape.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.
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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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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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The mind creates those things that exist.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
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
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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