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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
Purify
Pond
Ponds
Lilies
Dies

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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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You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
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Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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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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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford