Quote

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

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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.
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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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
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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.
William Stafford
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
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Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
William Stafford
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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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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.
William Stafford