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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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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Clear
Around
Give
Giving
Signals
Darkness
Deep
Maybe
More quotes by William Stafford
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
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
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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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
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
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
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
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
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
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