Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
William Stafford
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Stafford
Age: 79 †
Born: 1914
Born: January 17
Died: 1993
Died: August 28
Author
Poet
Writer
Hutchinson
Kansas
Begins
Exist
More quotes by William Stafford
The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.
William Stafford
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
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
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.
William Stafford
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
Language can do what it can’t say.
William Stafford
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
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
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
William Stafford
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
William Stafford
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
William Stafford
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William Stafford
Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?
William Stafford
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
You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.
William Stafford
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford
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
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
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
William Stafford