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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.

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
Meaning
Gone
Find
Book
Whole
Goat
Goats
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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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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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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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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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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 have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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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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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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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