William Stafford

“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.”

“...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.”

“Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourthof July, I'll bow and remember you. Whoshall we follow next? Who shall we killnext time?”

“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.”

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

“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”

“Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.”

“Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.”

“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”

“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.”

“I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is, why did other people stop?”

“So, the world happens twice--once what we see it as;second it legends itselfdeep, the way it is.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about.”

“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.”

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

“Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why.”