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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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Whole
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Writing
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Mind
Question
Good
Goes
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More quotes by William Stafford
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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
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
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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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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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.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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?
William Stafford
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford