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We forget the nature of true power. The power within is abundance. The power without is greed.

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
Within
Forget
True
Nature
Power
Without
Abundance
Greed

More quotes by 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.
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Buddha says there are two kinds of suffering: the kind that leads to more suffering and the kind that brings an end to suffering.
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I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.
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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.
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Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.
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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 think that water is a tremendous organizing principle.
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Lanscape shapes culture.
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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.
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There are times we have to put our body on the line for what we believe, for the injustices we see even within our own families.
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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.
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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.
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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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I admire how she protects her energy and understands her limitations.
Terry Tempest Williams
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The unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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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Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.
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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As children, we had access to all the open space imaginable. We would set up camps in rural Utah where the Tempest Company was at work laying pipe. We spent time around the West in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado. Wild beautiful places. Now, many of these natural places have disappeared under the press of development.
Terry Tempest Williams