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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
Banquet
Banquets
Kitchen
Honest
Lying

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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
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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.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
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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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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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.
William Stafford
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
William Stafford
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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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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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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.
William Stafford