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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.

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
Pavlov
Dog

More quotes by 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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
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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
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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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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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