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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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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Use
Every
Kind
Signals
Hidden
Code
Ordinary
Secret
Language

More quotes by William Stafford

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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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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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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.
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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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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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.
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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?
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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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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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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