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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.
William Stafford
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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
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Hutchinson
Kansas
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More quotes by William Stafford
Language can do what it can’t say.
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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
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
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.
William Stafford
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
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 ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
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
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
William Stafford
