Quote

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.

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
Still
Fields
Tall
Come
Wind
Shock
Nothing
Silence
Winter
Even
Stand
Calm
Good
Knew
Patient
Shocks
Would
Waiting
Field
Bye
Left
Wait
Whisper
Stills
Summer
October

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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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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.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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?
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What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
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I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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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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Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
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Language can do what it can’t say.
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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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'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
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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.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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