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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
Lilies
Dies
Purify
Pond
Ponds

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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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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Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
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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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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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The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.
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They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, Who are you really, wanderer?-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: Maybe I'm a king.
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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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Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
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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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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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