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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.
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
Congratulating
Cared
Glad
Bird
Nobody
Heard
More quotes by William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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.
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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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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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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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.
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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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Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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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.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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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.
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