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Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford -
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford -
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.
William Stafford -
And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford -
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 -
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford -
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.
William Stafford
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford -
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
William Stafford -
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.
William Stafford -
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.
William Stafford -
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford -
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?
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford -
Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.
William Stafford -
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
William Stafford -
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford -
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford -
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford