Quote

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

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
Every
Kind
Signals
Hidden
Code
Ordinary
Secret
Language
Use

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
...What you fear will not go away it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.
William Stafford
Image
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
William Stafford
Image
There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.
William Stafford
Image
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
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
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
Image
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
Image
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
William Stafford
Image
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
William Stafford
Image
I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.
William Stafford
Image
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
Image
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
Image
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.
William Stafford