Quote

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.

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
Come
Wind
Shock
Nothing
Silence
Winter
Even
Stand
Calm
Good
Knew
Patient
Shocks
Would
Waiting
Field
Bye
Left
Wait
Whisper
Stills
Summer
October
Still
Fields
Tall

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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
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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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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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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Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
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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.
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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.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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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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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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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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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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