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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
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Hutchinson
Kansas
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Signals
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Ordinary
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Language
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Every
More quotes by William Stafford
A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
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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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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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.
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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 were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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.
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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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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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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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.
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
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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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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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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