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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
Person
Star
Made
Missing
Kind
Stars
World
Wrong
Prevail
Others
Pattern
Home
Patterns
May
Miss
Persons
Following

More quotes by William Stafford

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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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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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A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
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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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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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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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.
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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When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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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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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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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One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
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