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

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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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You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
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Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
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A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
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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.
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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.
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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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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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The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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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.
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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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Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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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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.
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People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.
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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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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.
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