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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
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Hutchinson
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More quotes by William Stafford
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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
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
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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 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 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
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
...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.
William Stafford
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
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
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
