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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.

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
Snakes
Anywhere
Straight
Decided
Journey
Didn
Snake

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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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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.
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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 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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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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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?
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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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.
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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.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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