William Stafford Quotes
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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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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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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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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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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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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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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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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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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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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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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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.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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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And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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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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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.