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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
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Hutchinson
Kansas
Wisdom
Knowing
Understanding
Right
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Life
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More quotes by William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
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
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
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
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
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?
William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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
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