William Stafford Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.
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For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.
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It's my private life, and it's not up for grabs.
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I made my parents crazy. As a kid, I redecorated my bedroom every month. I would literally save my allowance and go buy things.
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As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
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I thought that communism, the tyranny of communism, was an abomination and I beseeched God to bring that terrible evil down and he did. It was a great triumph, it took awhile, but it happened.
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Detroit's industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.
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I haven't listened to much music lately; I've been out of it.
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No phone, a movie, a glass of wine, and some salad. Perfect!
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Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.
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The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.
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Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things.
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Between now and then and I just felt it was ready and it was a long enough period gone by. I obviously didn't want to hurt anybody, you know. It was done out of a genuine memorial or tribute whatever you want to call it.
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I'm a firm believer that the world should be your oyster when you're cooking. People should open themselves to other cuisines - there are a lot of hidden secrets all over the world.
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The motivation should come from regulatory enforcement, but enforcement is weak, and environmental litigation is near to impossible. So there's an urgent need for extensive public participation to generate another kind of motivation.
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There's no sex in Middle Earth.
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When I feel like my body is exhausted, I focus on making my fifth Olympic team so I can push through it.
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You listen to Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio in it, and it's not Black Sabbath. They should have just called it 'Heaven and Hell' right from the beginning. Because you listen to that 'Heaven and Hell' album, that doesn't sound anything close to Black Sabbath.
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I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.
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Haply for I am black, And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have; or for I am declined Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much— She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad And live upon the vapor of a dungeon Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others’ uses. Yet ’tis the plague of great ones; Prerogatived are they less than the base. ’Tis destiny unshunnable, like death.
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We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving.
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Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
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I think that essentially that this hue and cry that she isn't qualified, there's a sexist basis to it. Does she have the mental capacity? Give me a break. Would they say that about a man? I don't think they would.
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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.
