William Stafford Quotes
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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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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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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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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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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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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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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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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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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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 treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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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.
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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.