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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
Anywhere
Straight
Decided
Journey
Didn
Snake
Snakes

More quotes by William Stafford

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...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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.
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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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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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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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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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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford