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

William Stafford

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William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Owl
Breathed
Ears
Road
Along
Hear
Sound
Didn
Wandered

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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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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.
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
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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.
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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.
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A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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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.
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Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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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.
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The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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