William Stafford Quotes

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
William Stafford
I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
William Stafford
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is why did other people stop?
William Stafford
I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is why did other people stop?
William Stafford
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.
William Stafford
Between roars the lion purrs.
William Stafford
Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.
William Stafford
An owl sound wandered along the road with me.I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
William Stafford
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music
William Stafford
Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourthof July, I'll bow and remember you. Whoshall we follow next? Who shall we killnext time?
William Stafford
So, the world happens twice--once what we see it as;second it legends itselfdeep, the way it is.
William Stafford
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
They say that history is going on somewhere.They say it won't stop. I have heldOne picture still for a long time and waited.
William Stafford
I Have a Witness" Sometimes a center the soul can recognize will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or froma whirlwind ... The world can take, the soulrestores. A million wrong voices proclaim One light lives forever.
William Stafford
...What you fear will not go away; it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
William Stafford
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,and the meaning has to go find an author again.- The Trouble With Reading
William Stafford
They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
. . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?
William Stafford
If you don't know the kind of person I amand I don't know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
William Stafford
This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.
William Stafford
I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again.
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
Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why.
William Stafford