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.”

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

“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...”

“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 ex...”

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

“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...”

“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 t...”

“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.”

“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 so...”

“. . . On a sandbar sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?”

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

“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”