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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

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
Legends
Twice
Deep
Second
Happens
Way
World

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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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.
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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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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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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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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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
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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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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.
William Stafford