Quote

Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.

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
Quiet
Limit
Safe
Season
Beyond
Touched
Changed
Seasons
Found
Grateful
Waterfall
Back
Changes
Waterfalls
Come
Limits
Tasted
Gold
Streams

More quotes by William Stafford

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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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.
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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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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
William Stafford
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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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.
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The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
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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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I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
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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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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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.
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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