William Stafford Quotes - Page 3

'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'

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.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

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.

Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.

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.

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.

I'll be Pavlov, you be the 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.

People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.

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.

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.

The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.

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.