Quote

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.

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
Write
Spring
Hibernation
Place
Quiet
Underground
Home
Outside
Sequence
Live
Writer
Commit
Writing
Creative
Winter
Work
Community
Ground
Time
Family
Summer
Life
Fall
Bears

More quotes by Terry Tempest Williams

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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.
Terry Tempest Williams
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We write out of our humanity by writing through our direct experience. That which is most personal is most general, which becomes both our insight and protection as a writers. This is our authority as women, as human beings.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
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 come from a culture that embodies the need to convert others to the truth. The Mormon Church has one of the largest missionary programs in the world. That does not interest me.
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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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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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.
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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Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh?
Terry Tempest Williams
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I can only say that I believe the Mormon Church is changing because the people inside the church are changing, particularly, the women. And if the women in the Mormon Church are changing, that means the men in the Mormon Church will change - slowly, reluctantly to be sure, but inevitably.
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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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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It is where we embrace our questions. . . . Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?
Terry Tempest Williams
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I would say I am at peace with the mystery of my mother's journals. Of course, I will always wonder, but isn't that the creative tension of living with uncertainty? By leaving me her empty journals, my mother has made herself very present.
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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Every time we make love to a human being, fully, we are making love to everything that lives and breathes. In that sense it becomes communion. It is a sacrament.
Terry Tempest Williams
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Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.
Terry Tempest Williams
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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.
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