Quotes by William Stafford

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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. Its 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.

“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.”