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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
Kids
Anything
Music
Children
Dancer
Dancing
Dance
Childhood
Learn

More quotes by William Stafford

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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
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The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them — those are you, those are why you are in the world.
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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 writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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.
William Stafford
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
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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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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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.
William Stafford
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
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The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
William Stafford
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You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
William Stafford
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If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
William Stafford
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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.
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