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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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
Ends
Even
Upper
Believe
Believes
River
Beach
Rivers
Sea
Ocean
More quotes by William Stafford
You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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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.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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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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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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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.
William Stafford
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford