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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
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Knowing
Understanding
Right
Things
Life
Inspire
Growth
Learning
Wisdom

More quotes by William Stafford

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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
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.
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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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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When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
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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