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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

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
Person
Accept
Accepting
Artist
Others
Another
May
Persons
Decides
Able
Standards

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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.
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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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.
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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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The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
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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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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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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.
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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.
William Stafford