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

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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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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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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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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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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.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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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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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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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.
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Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford