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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

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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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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They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, Who are you really, wanderer?-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: Maybe I'm a king.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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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...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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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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 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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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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