Quote

You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.

William Stafford

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Treat
Treats
Surprise
Exercise
Experience
Self
Quirky
Surprises

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
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
Image
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
Image
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford
Image
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
William Stafford
Image
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
Image
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
Image
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
Image
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
Image
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
William Stafford
Image
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says -- north. That's what we count on.
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford