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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
Likes
Meaning
Gone
Find
Book
Whole
Goat
Goats
Author

More quotes by William Stafford

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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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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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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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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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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The earth says have a place, be what that place requires hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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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.
William Stafford