Quote

Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

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
Person
Accept
Accepting
Artist
Others
Another
May
Persons
Decides
Able
Standards

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.
William Stafford
Image
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
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 can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
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
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
...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
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
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
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
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
William Stafford
Image
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
Image
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
Image
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Image
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
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
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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