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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
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Hutchinson
Kansas
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Stop
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Sound
Delighting
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Words
Discovering
Everyone
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Born
Caring
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More quotes by William Stafford
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
...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
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
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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
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
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
William Stafford
