William Stafford
"“The Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes amongthings that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurtor die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread.~ William Stafford ~”"
23 Quotes
"“The Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes amongthings that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurtor die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread.~ William Stafford ~”"
"هكذا هي الأمور:
ثمة خيط تتبعه،
يمرّ بين أشياء تتغير،
لكنه لا يتغير.
يتساءل الناس عما تسعى إليه،
وعليك أن تشرح لهم أمر هذا الخيط.
لكن رؤيته صعبة على الآخرين.
ما دمت ممسكًا به، لن تضلّ أبدًا.
تحدث المآسي؛ يتأذى الناس أو يموتون؛
وأنت تعاني وتشيخ.
لا شيء تفعله يوقف تدفق الزمن.
لكنك لا تترك هذا الخيط أبدًا."
William Stafford
"Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why."
"الحكمة أن تستقيم أمور حياتك وتدرك علة ذلك."
William Stafford
"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. It's 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."
William Stafford
"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."
William Stafford
"I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is why did other people stop?"
William Stafford
"It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals a kind of secret code."
William Stafford
"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."
William 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 Stafford
"An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears."
William Stafford
"They say that history is going on somewhere. They say it won't stop. I have held One picture still for a long time and waited."
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
"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
"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
"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
". . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?"
William Stafford
"Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement."
William Stafford
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