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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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Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.
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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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...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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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 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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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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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Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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