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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 poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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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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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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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them — those are you, those are why you are in the world.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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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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