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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
Found
Persons
Person
Going
Much
Distracted
Like
Madness
Getting
Lost

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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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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...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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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 have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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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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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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