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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
Secret
Language
Use
Every
Kind
Signals
Hidden
Code
Ordinary

More quotes by William Stafford

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Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
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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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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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 can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford