I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again. - William Stafford
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions. - William Stafford
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 - William Stafford
The wars we haven't had saved many lives. - William Stafford
...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. - William Stafford
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. - William Stafford
Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river. - William Stafford
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement. - William Stafford
. . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold? - William Stafford
Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why. - William Stafford
They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king. - William Stafford
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. - William Stafford