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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

William Stafford

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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Broken
Problem
Everything
Parachute
Parachutes
Woven
Thoughtful
Kindness

More quotes by William Stafford

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I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as truths already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.
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I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, Who are you really, wanderer?-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: Maybe I'm a king.
William Stafford
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.
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Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
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A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
William Stafford
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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
William Stafford
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford