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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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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
World
Wrong
Prevail
Others
Pattern
Home
Patterns
May
Miss
Persons
Following
Person
Star
Made
Missing
Kind
Stars

More quotes by William Stafford

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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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?
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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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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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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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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 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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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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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford