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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
Understand
Many
Things
People
Admirable

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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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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.
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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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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, Who are you really, wanderer?-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: Maybe I'm a king.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
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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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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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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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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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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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