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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.

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
Kitchen
Honest
Lying
Banquet
Banquets

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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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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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 the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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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 speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
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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.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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.
William Stafford
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford