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

— 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

Between roars the lion purrs.

— William Stafford

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

— William Stafford

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. Furthermore, I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. Furthermore, I am a living evidence in the development of language.

— William Stafford

I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. Furthermore, I am a butterfly. Furthermore, I am not a butterfly collector. Furthermore, I want the experience of the butterfly.

— William Stafford

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

— William Stafford

I Have a Witness" Sometimes a center the soul can recognize will speak from anywhere, inside a mountain, or from whirlwind ... The world can take, the soul restores. A million wrong voices proclaim One light lives forever.

— 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 will never 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 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 Stafford