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If you purify the pond, the lilies die

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
Ponds
Lilies
Dies
Purify
Pond

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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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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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The earth says have a place, be what that place requires hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.
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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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It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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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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Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
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Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
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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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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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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