The wars we haven't had saved many lives
~ William Stafford
Wisdom is having things right in your lifeand knowing why.
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.
This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.
If you don't know the kind of person I amand I don't know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
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
...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.
I Have a Witness Sometimes a center the soul can recognize will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or froma whirlwind ... The world can take, the soulrestores. A million wrong voices proclaim One light lives forever.
They say that history is going on somewhere.They say it won't stop. I have heldOne picture still for a long time and waited.
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourthof July, I'll bow and remember you. Whoshall we follow next? Who shall we killnext time?
So, the world happens twice--once what we see it as;second it legends itselfdeep, the way it is.
Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.
Between roars the lion purrs.
Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.
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?
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. 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.
