William Stafford

They say that history is going on somewhere.They say it won't stop. I have heldOne picture still for a long time and waited.

I Have a Witness" Sometimes a center the soul can recognize will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or froma whirlwind ... The world can take, the soulrestores. A million wrong voices proclaim One light lives forever.

...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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone _ the library. And I never met a library I didn__ like.

Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why.

They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.

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.

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

. . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?

If you don't know the kind of person I amand I don't know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

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