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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
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Hutchinson
Kansas
Turns
Wait
Goings
Away
Silent
Stillness
Look
Exactly
River
Looks
Hold
Hidden
Silence
Current
Says
Currents
Turn
Miles
Waiting
Rivers
Comings
More quotes by 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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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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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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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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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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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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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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