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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'

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
Time
World
Listen
Says
Land
Alive
Pleasure

More quotes by William Stafford

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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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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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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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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My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
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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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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.
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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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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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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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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford