William Stafford Quotes
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.
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.
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
...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.
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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.
And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
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.
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.
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
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.
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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.
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.
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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.
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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.
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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.
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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.
