Quote

'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'

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
Pleasure
Time
World
Listen
Says
Land
Alive

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
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
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
An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.
William Stafford
Image
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
William Stafford
Image
Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.
William Stafford
Image
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
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
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
So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as second it legends itself deep, the way it is.
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
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
William Stafford
Image
A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
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
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
When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.
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
Image
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
Image
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
William Stafford