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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
Alive
Pleasure
Time
World
Listen
Says
Land

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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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 were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
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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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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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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
William Stafford