To do it artificially, to try to hype myself into being a better writer by doggedly reading better literature, is also a mistake. I learn to use the language by the pleasures it gives me when I am able to swim in it or maneuver in it or interchange in it with the people around me.

— William Edgar Stafford

William Edgar Stafford Quotes

People wander about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.

— William Edgar Stafford

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

— William Edgar Stafford

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.

— William Edgar Stafford

All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.

— William Edgar Stafford

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn’t hear it – I breathed it into my ears.

— William Edgar Stafford

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

— William Edgar Stafford

And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.

— William Edgar Stafford

You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.

— William Edgar Stafford

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

— William Edgar Stafford

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

— William Edgar Stafford

If you can say it, it begins to exist.

— William Edgar Stafford

You can lie at a banquet but you have to be honest in the kitchen.

— William Edgar Stafford

The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won’t blossom.

— William Edgar Stafford

I don’t see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as “truths” already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It’s like any discovery job; you don’t know what’s going to happen until you try it.

— William Edgar Stafford

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.

— William Edgar Stafford

The wars we haven’t had saved many lives.

— William Edgar Stafford

Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.

— William Edgar Stafford

Poetry Its door opens near. It’s a shrine by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around, listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their gold shell. When caravans cross deserts it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

— William Edgar Stafford

To do it artificially, to try to hype myself into being a better writer by doggedly reading better literature, is also a mistake. I learn to use the language by the pleasures it gives me when I am able to swim in it or maneuver in it or interchange in it with the people around me.

— William Edgar Stafford

Before you have your dreams, your dreams have you, and every day pushes a night before it while the wilderness follows.

— William Edgar Stafford
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