Quotes from Dee Williams

Books were smarter than me and words inspired me. I still think that Diane Ackerman's poem challenged me to build a little house in the first place - to try something new, charge forward without a clear understanding of what would happen next, because: given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?

The space reminded me of the small hay-bale clubhouses and scrap-wood tree forts that my brothers and I had made as kids - high up spaces where you could see things differently, where you could get your bearings.

I felt like a champion because I was figuring shit out. I was a doer and a getter-doner, and it was okay to be identified by the neighbors as the little lady who had a dump truck of manure delivered, a load that made the entire neighborhood smell like a dairy barn for weeks.

We were taught not to offer or invite aid, because, like it or not, helping is a messy, confused proposition; sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong, and sometimes you have no choice but to trust that the man holding your tire iron, cussing at your old lug nuts, is a deeply kind human after all.

I recognized that I was small and soft; I wanted to believe in people - that they were kind and good, and given the chance, everything would turn out okay - but bad things do happen, and sometimes the best you can do is swim through them, focus, and years later say, Ya, I know that feeling, when some smart ass asks whether you've ever been so scared you wanted to pee your pants.

Over time, I discovered that learning new things doesn't always liberate you. Instead it makes you wonder if your pants are on backward or if the trees are holding the sky up - it makes you question all of your assumptions and conventions.

Ultimately, I hoped the tiny-house guy was similar to me: a sane person without a big agenda, who simply wanted a way to make sense of the world, to create a new map with a big X in the middle labeled Home, even if that meant shrinking his world down to the size of an area rug.

I thought: This is what the living do. And I swooned at the ordinary nature of the task and myself, at my chapped hands and square palms, at the way my wrists bent and fingers flexed inside this living body.

Change what you can, darlin'. That's my best advice.

I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what help would really look like... I hadn't prepared myself for how humbled I'd feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help.

Perhaps the current state of my health should have raised a bright red caution flag, but instead it fired me up. I wanted to do what I wanted. I didn't care if hefting plywood and climbing ladders weren't on my doctor's recommended list of activities, or if I was foolhardy to think I could lift a fifty-pound roll of tar paper into and then out of my car. I was going to do it because it sounded like a blast, like the best possible way to have fun.

Fear and logic belong together.

Being an entrepreneur is a mental job... It takes patients! YOU are doing more motivation to yourself than anyone on this planet.

The naysayer has a place in your life, but if that is someone that you are considering to be your friend, do they truly add value in your life?

Oddly, I found myself calmer than I'd been in a long while. Maybe it was simply because my muscles ached or maybe because I felt that nothing was more compelling than the stack of wood that was waiting in Camelli's garage.

My friends stood on the ground two feet below me, and miles away from understanding why I would want to sleep on a trailer platform... I couldn't possibly begin to explain what was only beginning to bud inside me: I wanted a home. I wanted to be at home, in the world and in my body (a feeling I had been missing since I'd woken up in the hospital) and somehow, in some as yet undefined way, I knew that windows in the great room and a skylight over my bed were going to help with that.

Whatever you call me, my parents encouraged me to go to college and become a book lover, and to trust that I could do nearly anything if I could find the right book at the library. It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but they fell short in teaching me how to trust my instincts, and how to stop thinking with my educated brain and more with my kneecaps and butt cheeks.

We would see that each minute counts for something timeless and, if we want, we all can find our way inside these big, tiny moments. Beautiful!

Maybe is wasn't love so much as a fear of losing everything I'd accomplished. I was afraid to let go.

he had kidded with us that if we didn't let go at the proper moment, he would slap our hands with a stick, and we had all laughed because who would be silly enough to hang on when they should let go?

Sometimes you simply do the things you do, and it doesn't necessarily help to pick on the old you by proclaiming how smart the new you is. - The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir

The Internet is dumb. The Internet, with all its access to brain research, anthropology journals, social studies networks, and biographies and autobiographies, can't begin to map the complexity of our lives, or how we each affect others.

I wanted to say a lot but wasn't sure where to start; people don't want to hear about how your heart has melted into the dirt under your house.

Maybe is wasn't love so much as a fear of losing everything I'd accomplished. I was afraid to let go.