William Stafford Quotes

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the Stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-waiver Meal-drift molded ever and melted across skies?

It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.

Linus: It was a short summer, Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown: And it looks like it's gonna be a looong winter.

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.

If you come as softly As wind within the trees You may hear what I hear See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly As threading dew I will take you gladly Nor ask more of you. You may sit beside me Silent as a breath Only those who stay dead Shall remember death. And if you come I will be silent Nor speak harsh words to you. I will not ask you why, now. Or how, or what you do. We shall sit here, softly Beneath two different years And the rich earth between us Shall drink our tears.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.

Above all, what I learned from my Sensei was how to wait. I believe I learned the meaning of waiting on one foot. If I understand anything in this life, it is how to wait. It is not an answer. But for me it is everything.

I didn't walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before

The hushed winds their Sabbath keep.

Earth, left silent by the wind of night,Seems shrunken 'neath the gray unmeasured height.

The year's in wane; There is nothing adorning; The night has no eve, And the day has no morning; Cold winter gives warning!

Silence is like nightfall. Objects are lost in it insensibly.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light.

Sometimes, the hardest thing was doing nothing.

A man says a lot of things in summer he doesn't mean in winter.

The answers come when you are quietly willing to be without them.