Quote

The earth says have a place, be what that place requires hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.

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
Deep
Behind
Says
Ridges
Hear
Imply
Sound
Birds
Place
Requires
Earth
Bird
Behinds

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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
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When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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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They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, Who are you really, wanderer?-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: Maybe I'm a king.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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