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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

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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Everyone
Starts
Born
Caring
Persons
Kept
Person
Poet
Real
Question
Work
Stop
Way
Sound
Delighting
People
Words
Discovering

More quotes by William Stafford

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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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.
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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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
William Stafford
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and 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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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford