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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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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
War
Soldiers
Experience
Peoples
Important
Owners
Every
Soldier
People
Slave
Blinded
Subject
Inferior
Subjects
Inferiors
Learn
Slaves

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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.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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.
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A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
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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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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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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.
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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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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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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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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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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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.
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