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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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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Quirky
Surprises
Treat
Treats
Surprise
Exercise
Experience
Self

More quotes by William Stafford

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I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
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The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
William Stafford
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The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them — those are you, those are why you are in the world.
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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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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.
William Stafford
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
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Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
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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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It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
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 embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
William Stafford
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
William Stafford