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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
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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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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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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.
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Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
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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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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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.
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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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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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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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.
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