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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
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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
Anyone
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Comes
Piece
Whole
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Writing
Pieces
Mind
Question
Good
Goes
Emergencies
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Holds
More quotes by William Stafford
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.
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
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.
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
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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
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
The earth says have a place, be what that place requires hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.
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
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.
William Stafford
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford