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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
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Hutchinson
Kansas
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Turn
Miles
Waiting
Rivers
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Wait
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More quotes by 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?
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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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.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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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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.
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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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.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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