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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

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
Dancing
Dance
Childhood
Learn
Kids
Anything
Music
Children
Dancer

More quotes by William Stafford

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One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
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Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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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.
William Stafford
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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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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.
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All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
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I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
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...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
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Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
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Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
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I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
William Stafford
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
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When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
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