Quote

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.

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
Long
Watch
Evenings
Think
Along
Invite
Thinking
Please
Invites
Life
Hold
Roll
World
Open
Evening
Morning
Breathe
Party
Close
Hands
Watches

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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
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I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.
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A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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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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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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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.
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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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You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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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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Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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If you purify the pond, the lilies die
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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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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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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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The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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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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If you can say it, it begins to exist.
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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.
William Stafford