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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.

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
Hear
Reason
Things
World

More quotes by William Stafford

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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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?
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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.
William Stafford
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
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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
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
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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.
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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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.
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