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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
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Hutchinson
Kansas
Many
Pebbles
Wash
Roll
Shape
Shapes
Sea
Ocean
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More quotes by William Stafford
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
William Stafford
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
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
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
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, Who are you really, wanderer?-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: Maybe I'm a king.
William Stafford
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford