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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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
Already
Talking
Words
Need
Many
Needs
More quotes by William Stafford
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
William Stafford
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
William Stafford
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
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
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
William Stafford
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
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
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford