Best 68 quotes of William Stafford on MyQuotes

William Stafford

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.

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    William Stafford

    Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.

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    William Stafford

    A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

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    William Stafford

    Ask Me Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made. I will listen to what you say. 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.

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    William Stafford

    A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

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    William Stafford

    Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

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    William Stafford

    Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.

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    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?

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    I have a feeling that art is something you do for yourself, and that any time you turn your decisions over to someone else you're postponing at best, your own development. The atmosphere of the workshop should be that of trying out one's own work and accepting the signals from others but not accepting the dictation of others because that is a violation of the spirit of art. Art can't be done by somebody else, it has got to be done by the artist.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.

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    William Stafford

    It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

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    William Stafford

    Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.

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    William Stafford

    Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

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    William Stafford

    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?

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    William Stafford

    Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

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    William Stafford

    People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

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    William Stafford

    So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    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.

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    William Stafford

    The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.

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    William Stafford

    There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

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    William Stafford

    There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

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    William Stafford

    The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.

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    William Stafford

    The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    The Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread. ~ William Stafford ~

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    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.

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    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.

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    William Stafford

    When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.