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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
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More quotes by William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
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
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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 have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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.
William Stafford
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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 can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
