William Stafford
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.Collection: Music
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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.
I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is, why did other people stop?
You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about.
I'll be me, but I don't like it.
The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them — those are you, those are why you are in the world.Collection: Talking
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?Collection: Real
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.Collection: Morning
You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking aboutCollection: Talking
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 ~Collection: Letting Go
If you purify the pond, the lilies dieCollection: Ponds
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.Collection: Butterfly
And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.Collection: World
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.Collection: Rivers
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.Collection: Block
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.Collection: Process
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.Collection: Breathe
Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.Collection: Dream
...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.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Bird
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.Collection: Beach
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.Collection: Grateful
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.Collection: Exercise
Language can do what it can’t say.Collection: Language
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Art
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.Collection: Flower
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'Collection: Land
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.Collection: Writing
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.Collection: Owl
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.Collection: Crafts
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.Collection: War
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.Collection: Artist
Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Snow
I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as "truths" already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job; you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.Collection: Jobs
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Writing
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.Collection: Spiritual
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.Collection: Development
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.Collection: Rain
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.Collection: Ocean
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?Collection: Trying
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.Collection: People
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.Collection: Purpose
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.Collection: Moving
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.Collection: Attention