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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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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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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.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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 poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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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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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 don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as truths already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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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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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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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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford