Quotes from William Stafford

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

It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.

The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.

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.

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is, why did other people stop?

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

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.

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.

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

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.

You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.

...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.

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