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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
Banquets
Kitchen
Honest
Lying
Banquet
More quotes by William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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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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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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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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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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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 speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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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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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.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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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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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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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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