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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
Respect
Bring
Better
Ever
Right
Wherever
World
Breathing
Carry
Gift

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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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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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?
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
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