Quotes from 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.

Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

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.

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.

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

You are a memory too strong to leave this world...

I am your own way of looking at things," she said. "When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation

We think it is calm here, or that our storm is the right size.

There may be losses too great to understand That rove after you and--faint and terrible-- rip unknown through your hand.

The wars we haven't had saved many lives.

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.

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.

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.

Which of the horses we passed yesterday whinnied all night in my dreams? I want that one.

Poverty plus confidence equals pioneers. We never doubted.

On a sandbar sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?

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. ... And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

Poetry Its door opens near. It's a shrine by the road, it's a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, "Look around, listen. Feel the air." It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their gold shell. When caravans cross deserts it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

Glances Two people meet. The sky turns winter, quells whatever they would say. Then, a periphery glance into danger - and an avalanche already on its way. They have been honest all their lives; careful, calm, never in haste; they didn't know what it is to meet. Now they have met: the world is waste. They find they are riding an avalanche feeling at rest, all danger gone. The present looks out of their eyes; they stand calm and still on a speeding stone.

Our Story" Remind me again—together we trace our strange journey, find each other, come on laughing. Some time we'll cross where life ends. We'll both look back as far as forever, that first day. I'll touch you—a new world then. Stars will move a different way. We'll both end. We'll both begin. Remind me again.

Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.