Quote

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life 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
Party
Close
Hands
Watches
Long
Watch
Evenings
Think
Along
Invite
Thinking
Please
Invites
Life
Hold
Roll
World
Open
Evening
Morning
Breathe

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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.
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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.
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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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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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...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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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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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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