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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

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
Admirable
Understand
Many
Things
People

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When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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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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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.
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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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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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