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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
Experience
Peoples
Important
Owners
Every
Soldier
People
Slave
Blinded
Subject
Inferior
Subjects
Inferiors
Learn
Slaves
War
Soldiers

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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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My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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.
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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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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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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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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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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 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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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford