Quote

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

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
Learning
Latest
Language
Maker
Living
Dictionary
Persons
Makers
Person
Established
Even
Definitions
Evidence
Dictionaries
Development
Contend

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
Image
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
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
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
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
It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.
William Stafford
Image
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
William Stafford
Image
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
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
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.
William Stafford
Image
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
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
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
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
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
William Stafford
Image
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford