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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

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
Life
Enhancement
Separate
Picture
Flow
Literature
Experience
Kind

More quotes by William Stafford

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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.
William Stafford
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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?
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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
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...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
William Stafford
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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
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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.
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.
William Stafford