Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
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
Nothing
Silence
Winter
Even
Stand
Calm
Good
Knew
Patient
Shocks
Would
Waiting
Field
Bye
Left
Wait
Whisper
Stills
Summer
October
Still
Fields
Tall
Come
Wind
Shock
More quotes by William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
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.
William Stafford
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
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
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
William Stafford
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?
William Stafford
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
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
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
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
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
