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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
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Hutchinson
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Life
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Wisdom
Knowing
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Right
Things
More quotes by William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
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
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
The earth says have a place, be what that place requires hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.
William Stafford
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
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
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
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
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford