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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
Pond
Ponds
Lilies
Dies
Purify

More quotes by William Stafford

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My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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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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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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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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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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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
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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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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.
William Stafford
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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.
William Stafford