Top 73 Quotes & Sayings by William Stafford - Page 2

I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.

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.

The signals we give-yes or no, or maybe-/should be clear/the darkness around us is deep.

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.

People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.

Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone... The whole wide world pours down.

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.

The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable.

There are so many things admirable people do not understand.

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.