William Stafford

Poet

1914-01-17

Quotes by William Stafford

• They say that history is going on somewhere.They say it won't stop. I have heldOne picture still for a long time and waited.

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• I Have a Witness Sometimes a center the soul can recognize will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or froma whirlwind ... The world can take, the soulrestores. A million wrong voices proclaim One light lives forever.

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• ...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.

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• 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

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• This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.

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• 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.

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• I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again.

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• If you don't know the kind of person I amand I don't know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

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• . . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?

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

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• 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.

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• They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,Who are you really, wanderer?--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:Maybe I'm a king.

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• Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why.

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• They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,Who are you really, wanderer?--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:Maybe I'm a king.

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• If you don't know the kind of person I amand I don't know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

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• They say that history is going on somewhere.They say it won't stop. I have heldOne picture still for a long time and waited.

  Read quote

• This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.

  Read quote

• 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

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• I Have a Witness Sometimes a center the soul can recognize will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or froma whirlwind ... The world can take, the soulrestores. A million wrong voices proclaim One light lives forever.

  Read quote

• I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again.

  Read quote