William Stafford Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

I’ll be me, but I don’t like it.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.

Language can do what it can’t say.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.

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.