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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?

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
Ever
Right
Wherever
World
Breathing
Carry
Gift
Respect
Bring
Better

More quotes by William Stafford

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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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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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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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All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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 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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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.
William Stafford