Quote

Language can do what it can’t say.

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
Language

More quotes by William Stafford

Image
You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.
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
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
Image
And the things you know before you hear them these are you and the reason you are in the world.
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
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
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
You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about
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
A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.
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
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
William Stafford
Image
'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'
William Stafford
Image
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
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 greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
William Stafford
Image
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
William Stafford
Image
It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.
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
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
William Stafford