“ 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
“ 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. 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
“ 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. William Stafford
“ An owl sound wandered along the road with me.I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears. 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
“ I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is why did other people stop? 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
“ . . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold? William Stafford
“ I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again. 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 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… 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 developme… William Stafford
“ 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 crescend… William Stafford
“ Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement. William Stafford
