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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

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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Persons
Person
Going
Much
Distracted
Like
Madness
Getting
Lost
Found

More quotes by William Stafford

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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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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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Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
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One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
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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 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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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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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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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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My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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?
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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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