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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.
William Stafford
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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
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Hutchinson
Kansas
Minutes
Memories
Bring
Bucket
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Cool
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Plans
More quotes by William Stafford
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
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
You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
William Stafford
All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
William Stafford
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
William Stafford
I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.
William Stafford
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
William Stafford
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as truths already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.
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
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford