Quote

It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.

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
Touch
Half
Universe
Whole
Right
Love
Wakes

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
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
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
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
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
Image
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
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
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
Image
You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
William Stafford
Image
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
Image
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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
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
My question is when did other people give up the idea of being a poet? You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford
Image
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
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
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
Image
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford