William Stafford Quotes

...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.

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.

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

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

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.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"-
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king.

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