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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
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Hutchinson
Kansas
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Work
Stop
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Delighting
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Words
Discovering
Everyone
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Caring
More quotes by William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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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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I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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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.
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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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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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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.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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?
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
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