Top 86 William Stafford Quotes
#2. Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
William Stafford
#3. A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
#5. Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now?
William Stafford
#6. 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
#7. Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child?
William Stafford
#8. Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
#9. 'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
#10. A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
#11. People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
#12. 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
#13. What you have to do as a writer is ... write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
#14. Readers should not be loaded with more information and guidance than a lively mind needs
puzzlement can be accepted, but insulting clarity is fatal to a poem.
William Stafford
#15. I would exchange all that I have written for the next thing.
William Stafford
#16. 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.
William Stafford
#17. 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.
William Stafford
#18. I Have a Witness"
Sometimes a center the soul can recognize
will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or from
a whirlwind ... The world can take, the soul
restores. A million wrong voices proclaim
One light lives forever.
William Stafford
#20. This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen.
William Stafford
#21. I am your own way of looking at things," she said. "When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation
William Stafford
#22. Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
William Stafford
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourth
of July, I'll bow and remember you. Who
shall we follow next? Who shall we kill
next time?
William Stafford
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. An owl sound wandered along the road with me.
I didn't hear it
I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
#32. There may be losses too great to understand
That rove after you and
faint and terrible
rip unknown through your hand.
William Stafford
#34. One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
William Stafford
#35. 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
#37. There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
#38. You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about.
William Stafford
#41. So, the world happens twice
once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
#42. We think it is calm here, or that our storm is the right size.
William Stafford
#46. There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
#47. Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says
north. That's what we count on.
William Stafford
#48. Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music
William Stafford
#50. They say that history is going on somewhere.
They say it won't stop. I have held
One picture still for a long time and waited.
William Stafford
#51. Those who champion democracy, but make a fetish of never accepting anything they don't agree with
what advantage do they see in democracy?
William Stafford
#52. 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
#53. The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
#54. 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.
William Stafford
#55. It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
#56. Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
#58. A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
#59. Yes
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out - no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
William Stafford
#60. The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford
#61. Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
William Stafford
#62. Most mornings I get away, slip out the door before light, set forth on the dim, gray road, letting my feet find a cadence that softly carries me on. Nobody is up - all alone my journey begins. Some
William Stafford
#63. On a sandbar
sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it
a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?
William Stafford
#64. 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
#66. Which of the horses
we passed yesterday whinnied
all night in my dreams?
I want that one.
William Stafford
#67. A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
William Stafford
#68. 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
#69. If it should happen you wake up and Armageddon has come, lie still.
William Stafford
#70. 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
#72. It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
#73. The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
William Stafford
#74. I heard a bird congratulating itself
all day for being a jay.
Nobody cared. But it was glad
all over again, and said so, again.
William Stafford
#75. 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
#77. Politicians need citizens who will permit them to behave reasonably.
William Stafford
#78. My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
#79. The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing the things you do not have to hear dulls your hearing. And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
#80. When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
#81. Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
#82. You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
William Stafford
#83. Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
#84. You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
#85. You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
#86. Those times you caught them out and showed them up
they learned how stupid they are. But now you'll never hear the little song of their purring throats, and you'll never know what they think, when you say hello.
William Stafford
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