William Stafford Quotes

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.

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.

The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.

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

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

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.

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.

Between roars the lion purrs.