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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.

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
Breathes
Rhythm
Breathe
Anyone
Business

More quotes by William Stafford

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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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.
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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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.
William Stafford
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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.
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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
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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.
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