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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
More quotes by William Stafford
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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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.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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.
William Stafford
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
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
Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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.
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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.
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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