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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.
William Stafford -
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.
William Stafford
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford -
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
William Stafford -
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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.
William Stafford -
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford -
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
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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.
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.
William Stafford -
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford -
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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?
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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford -
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford -
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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.
William Stafford -
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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.
William Stafford
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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.
William Stafford -
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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.
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