William Stafford Quotes
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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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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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
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So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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...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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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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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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.