William Stafford Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.”
-- William Stafford -
“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”
-- William Stafford -
“I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.”
-- William Stafford -
“Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.”
-- William Stafford -
“If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”
-- William Stafford -
“Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.”
-- William Stafford -
“Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.”
-- William Stafford -
“A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.”
-- William Stafford -
“Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.”
-- William Stafford -
“The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.”
-- 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 -
“The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.”
-- 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 -
“Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?”
-- William Stafford -
“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”
-- William Stafford -
“There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.”
-- William Stafford -
“It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.”
-- William Stafford -
“It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.”
-- William Stafford -
“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 -
“So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.”
-- William Stafford -
“Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.”
-- William Stafford -
“You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.”
-- William Stafford -
“When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.”
-- William Stafford -
“Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.”
-- William Stafford -
“Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.”
-- William Stafford -
“The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.”
-- William Stafford
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