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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
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
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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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
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.
William Stafford
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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?
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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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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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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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The earth says have a place, be what that place requires hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.
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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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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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
