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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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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Hear
Sound
Didn
Wandered
Owl
Breathed
Ears
Road
Along
More quotes by William Stafford
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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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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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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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?
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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.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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.
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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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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.
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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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.
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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.
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You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
William Stafford