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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
Look
Exactly
River
Looks
Hold
Hidden
Silence
Current
Says
Currents
Turn
Miles
Waiting
Rivers
Comings
Turns
Wait
Goings
Away
Silent
Stillness
More quotes by William Stafford
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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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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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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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford