Quote

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.

William Stafford

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Participate
Butterfly
Discovery
Embrace
Experience
Collector
Collectors
Emerging

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
Image
They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, Who are you really, wanderer?-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: Maybe I'm a king.
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Image
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
Image
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
Image
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
Image
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
Image
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
Image
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
Image
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
William Stafford
Image
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
Image
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
Image
Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
William Stafford
Image
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford