William Stafford

“The things you do not have to say make you rich.”

“There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change.”

“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”

“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.”

“Say it, no ideas but in things.”

“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.”

“Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.”

“You must revise your life.”

“For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”

“Justice will take us millions of intricate moves.”

“My work is being ahead of myself, discovering the next thing. I'll know it when I get there.”

“If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”

“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.”