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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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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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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Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
William Stafford
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
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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.
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.
William Stafford
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
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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
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Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
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An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
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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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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.
William Stafford