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

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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.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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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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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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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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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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The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them — those are you, those are why you are in the world.
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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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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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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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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.
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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 ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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