I'll be me, but I don't like it.
quote by William Stafford
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
quote by William Stafford
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
quote by William Stafford
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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about.
quote by William Stafford
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I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is, why did other people stop?
quote by William Stafford
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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.
quote by William Stafford
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American Gothic
If we see better through tiny,
grim glasses, we like to wear
tiny, grim glasses.
Our parents willed us this
view. It's tundra? We love it.
We travel our kind of
Renaissance: barnfuls of hay,
whole voyages of corn, and
a book that flickers its
halo in the parlor.
Poverty plus confidence equals
pioneers. We never doubted.
poem by William Stafford
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Passing Remark
In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don’t like much to happen.
In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.
My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, “Then why did you choose me?”
Mildly I lower my brown eyes—
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.
poem by William Stafford
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Remembering Mountain Men
I put my foot in cold water
and hold it there: early mornings
they had to wade through broken ice
to find the traps in the deep channel
with their hands, drag up the chains and
the drowned beaver. The slow current
of the life below tugs at me all day.
When I dream at night, they save a place for me,
no matter how small, somewhere by the fire.
poem by William Stafford
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Across Kansas
My family slept those level miles
but like a bell rung deep till dawn
I drove down an aisle of sound,
nothing real but in the bell,
past the town where I was born.
Once you cross a land like that
you own your face more: what the light
struck told a self; every rock
denied all the rest of the world.
We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate--
My state still dark, my dream too long to tell.
poem by William Stafford
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