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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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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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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 greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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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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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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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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...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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
William Stafford