William Stafford Quotes
-
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
-
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
-
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
-
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
-
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
-
...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 poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
-
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
-
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
-
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
-
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
-
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?
-
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.
-
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
-
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
-
And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
-
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.
-
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
-
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
-
Language can do what it can’t say.
-
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.