Quote

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
Discovery
Embrace
Experience
Collector
Collectors
Emerging
Participate
Butterfly

More quotes by 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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
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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.
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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...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
William Stafford
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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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.
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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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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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.
William Stafford
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
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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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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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