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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
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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Looks
Hold
Hidden
Silence
Current
Says
Currents
Turn
Miles
Waiting
Rivers
Comings
Turns
Wait
Goings
Away
Silent
Stillness
Look
Exactly
River
More quotes by William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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 speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
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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.
William Stafford
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
William Stafford
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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 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