Quote

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

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
Speech
Attention
Something
Distract

More quotes by William Stafford

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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.
William Stafford
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Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.
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
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
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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
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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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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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It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
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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