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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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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Collectors
Emerging
Participate
Butterfly
Discovery
Embrace
Experience
Collector

More quotes by 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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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'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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?
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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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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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
William Stafford
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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 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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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
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My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
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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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford