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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
Gift
Respect
Bring
Better
Ever
Right
Wherever
World
Breathing
Carry

More quotes by William Stafford

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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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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.
William Stafford
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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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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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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
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
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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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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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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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
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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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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford