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
Think
Along
Invite
Thinking
Please
Invites
Life
Hold
Roll
World
Open
Evening
Morning
Breathe
Party
Close
Hands
Watches
Long
Watch
Evenings

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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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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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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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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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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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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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