Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Emerging
Participate
Butterfly
Discovery
Embrace
Experience
Collector
Collectors
More quotes by William Stafford
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
William Stafford
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
William Stafford
Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
William Stafford
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
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
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
William Stafford
A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
William Stafford
My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford