William Stafford Quotes

The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

~ William Stafford ~ ~ William Stafford

It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half. ~ William Stafford

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

Today"

The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere
a signal arrives: "Now," and the rays
come down. A tomorrow has come. Open
your hands, lift them: morning rings
all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer.
Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now,
you could close your eyes and go on full of light.

And it is already begun, the chord
that will shiver glass, the song full of time
bending above us. Outside, a sign:
a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air,
"Be warm." No one is out there, but a giant
has passed through town, widening streets, touching
the ground, shouldering away the stars. ~ William Stafford

I'll be me, but I don't like it. ~ William Stafford

Which of the horses
we passed yesterday whinnied
all night in my dreams?
I want that one. ~ William Stafford

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

Afterwards
Mostly you look back and say, "Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it's not too bad, but look - things happen like that, and you did what you could."
You go back and pick up the pieces. There's tomorrow. There's that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots.
Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn. ~ William Stafford

Father and son

No sound - a spell- on, on out
where the wind went, our kite sent back
its thrill along the string that
sagged but sang and said, "I'm here!
I'm here!" - till broke somewhere,
gone years ago, but sailed forever clear
of earth. I hold-whatever tugs
the other end-I hold that string. ~ William Stafford

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.
- The Trouble With Reading ~ William Stafford

This dream the world is having about itself
includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,
a groove in the grass my father showed us all
one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell
something better about to happen. ~ William Stafford

We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday,
Holding pages back on the calendar,
Remembering every turn in the roadway:
We hold that sky, we said, and remember.
So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid.
Some day like this might save the world. ~ William Stafford

Those times you caught them out and showed them up
they learned how stupid they are. But now you'll never hear the little song of their purring throats, and you'll never know what they think, when you say hello. ~ William Stafford

I Have a Witness"

Sometimes a center the soul can recognize
will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or from
a whirlwind ... The world can take, the soul
restores. A million wrong voices proclaim
One light lives forever. ~ William Stafford

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come-maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours. ~ 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

There are so many things admirable people do not understand. ~ William Stafford

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. ~ William Stafford

Why I Am Happy
Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is. ~ William Stafford

Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child? ~ William Stafford

The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing the things you do not have to hear dulls your hearing. And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world. ~ 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

I have a feeling that art is something you do for yourself, and that any time you turn your decisions over to someone else you're postponing at best, your own development. The atmosphere of the workshop should be that of trying out one's own work and accepting the signals from others but not accepting the dictation of others because that is a violation of the spirit of art. Art can't be done by somebody else, it has got to be done by the artist. ~ William Stafford

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all, I'd know more -- the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light. ~ William Stafford

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop? ~ William Stafford

Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why. ~ 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

You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen. ~ William Stafford

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog. ~ William Stafford

With Kit, Age Seven, at the Beach
We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.
Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.
Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.
"How far could you swim, Daddy, in such a storm?"
"As far as was needed," I said,
and as I talked, I swam. ~ 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

In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone - the library. And I never met a library I didn't like. ~ William Stafford

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

You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about. ~ William Stafford

Remarks on My Character
Waving a flag I retreat a long way beyond
any denial, all the way over the scorched earth,
and come into an arching grove of evasions,
onto those easy paths, one leading to another
and covered ever deeper with shade: I'll never
dare the sun again, that I can promise.
It is time to practice the shrug: "Don't count on
me." Or practice the question that drags its broken
wing over the ground and leads into the swamp
where vines trip anyone in a hurry, and a final
dark pool waits for you to stare at yourself
while shadows move closer over your shoulder.
That's my natural place; I can live where the blurred
faces peer back at me. I like the way
they blend, and no one is ever sure itself
or likely to settle in unless you scare off
the others. Afraid but so deep no one can follow,
I steal away there, holding my arms like a tree. ~ William Stafford

Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be. ~ 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

Most mornings I get away, slip out the door before light, set forth on the dim, gray road, letting my feet find a cadence that softly carries me on. Nobody is up - all alone my journey begins. Some ~ William Stafford

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

Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful. ~ William Stafford

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

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code. ~ William Stafford

If you can say it, it begins to exist. ~ William Stafford

If it should happen you wake up and Armageddon has come, lie still. ~ William Stafford

When I Met My Muse"

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off - they were still singing, They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand ~ William Stafford

I am your own way of looking at things," she said. "When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation ~ William Stafford

So, the world happens twice
once what we see it as;
second it legends itself
deep, the way it is. ~ William Stafford

Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean. ~ William Stafford

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

An Afternoon in the Stacks
Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move. ~ William Stafford

The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It's not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found. ~ William Stafford

I heard a bird congratulating itself
all day for being a jay.
Nobody cared. But it was glad
all over again, and said so, again. ~ William Stafford

Saint Matthew and All

Lorene - we thought she'd come home. But
it got late, and then days. Now
it has been years. Why shouldn't she,
if she wanted? I would: something comes
along, a sunny day, you start walking;
you meet a person who says, "Follow me,"
and things lead on.

Usually, it wouldn't happen, but sometimes
the neighbors notice your car is gone, the
patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades.
They forget.

In the Bible it happened - fishermen, Levites.
They just went away and kept going. Thomas,
away off in India, never came back.

But Lorene- it was a stranger maybe, and he
said, "Your life, I need it." And nobody else did. ~ William Stafford

We think it is calm here, or that our storm is the right size. ~ William Stafford

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement. ~ William Stafford

Those who champion democracy, but make a fetish of never accepting anything they don't agree with
what advantage do they see in democracy? ~ William Stafford

Assurance:
You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums, or in the silence after lightning before it says its names-and then the clouds' wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles-you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head- that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. The whole wide world pours down. ~ William Stafford

Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
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

Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision. ~ William Stafford

The earth says have a place, be what that place
requires; hear the sound the birds imply
and see as deep as ridges go behind
each other. ~ William Stafford

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand. ~ William Stafford

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

Politicians need citizens who will permit them to behave reasonably. ~ William Stafford

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. ~ William Stafford

Protest poetry
could there be consensus poetry? ~ William Stafford

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things. ~ William Stafford

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. ~ William Stafford

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

Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourth
of July, I'll bow and remember you. Who
shall we follow next? Who shall we kill
next time? ~ William Stafford

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

Whatever can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? ~ William Stafford

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu. ~ William Stafford

Between roars the lion purrs. ~ William Stafford

The wars we haven't had saved many lives. ~ William Stafford

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

If you purify the pond, the lilies die ~ 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

On a sandbar
sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it
a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold? ~ 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 would exchange all that I have written for the next thing. ~ William Stafford

Waiting for God"


This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air's memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.

This deliberate day eased
past the calendar and waited. Patiently
the sun instructed the shadows how to move;
it held them, guided their gradual defining.
In the great quiet I carried my life on,
in again, out again. ~ William Stafford

Energy is eternal delight. ~ William Blake

It is strongly suspected that a NEWTON or SHAKESPEARE excels other mortals only by a more ample development of the anterior cerebral lobes, by having an extra inch of brain in the right place. ~ Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet

The Information Age is, first and foremost, an education age, in which education must start at birth and continue throughout a lifetime. Last year, from this podium, I said that education has to be our highest priority. I have something to say to every family listening to us tonight: Your children can go on to college ... Because of the things that have been done, we can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today. And, my friends, that will change the face and future of America. ~ William J. Clinton

Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. ~ William James

The Israelis object to an imposed settlement I don't know what they mean by an imposed settlement. It's quite obvious, without the all out support by the United States in money and weapons and so on the Israelis couldn't do what they've been doing. So we bear a very great share of the responsibility for the continuation of this ... of this state of warfare. ~ J. William Fulbright

Carrying on as usual carries enormous risks, condemning today's students to a world of constant insecurity and frequent catastrophes. ~ William H. Calvin

He even obsessively contemplates the fact that he obsessively contemplates. ~ William Shakespeare

Breathes there a man with soul so dead that it does not glow at the thought of what the men of his blood have done and suffered to make his country what it is? There is room, plenty of room, for proper pride of land and birth. What I inveigh against is a cursed spirit of intolerance, conceived in distrust and bred in ignorance, that makes the mental attitude perennially antagonistic, even bitterly antagonistic, to everything foreign, that subordinates everywhere the race to the nation, forgetting the higher claims of human brotherhood. ~ William Osler

I can do this, he was thinking. All I have to do is just be as normal as everyone else. All I have to do is just not blow apart like a two-dollar clock. Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street. ~ William Gay

One tires of a page of which every sentence sparkles with points, of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes or your own. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

One strange feeling, which I remember clearly, was a powerful link with the slain, particularly those that had fallen within the past hour or two. There was so much death around that life seemed almost indecent. Some men's uniforms were soaked with gobs of blood. The ground was sodden with it. I killed, too. ~ William Manchester

Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast. ~ William Congreve

Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness. ~ William Ralph Inge

BEATRICE Is he not approved in the height a villain that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman? O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour - O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place. ~ William Shakespeare

I'm not much of a preparer. I think sometimes as an actor you need to go out and learn some skills, but in terms of preparation for understanding the character, it's all on the page, and if it's not on the page, you're in trouble. ~ William H. Macy

Auguries of innocence
The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please. ~ William Blake

Sweet Rose of Virtue

Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue that is held most dear―
except only that you are merciless.


Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet everywhere, no odor but bitter rue.

I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair rose of pallid and gentle cast,
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that, if I could, I would compose her roots again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been. ~ William Dunbar

Fear & Hope are - Vision ~ William Blake

Careful with fire is good advice we know. Careful with words is ten times doubly so. ~ William Carleton

Well, if he calls that trifling,' said Babbington, nodding at the slung arm and the heavily bandaged leg and the waxen face, 'God help us if ever he tells us we are seriously hurt.'
'Amen,' said Jack. 'William, have you considered the Diane?'
'Yes, sir, and a very pretty ship she is - a fine narrow entry and the most elegant lines, though she is so low in the water she don't appear to advantage.'
'Why, she has twelve or even eighteen months stores aboard: she was going foreign, far foreign. But what I meant was, all those young women walking about her deck. Have you considered them?'
'Oh yes, sir,' said Babbington, a lubricious creature who had been considering them through a telescope at close range ever since they began to appear. 'There is a particularly handsome one in green just abaft the hances. ~ Patrick O'Brian