William Stafford Quotes

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

Even silence speaks.

Silence is ever speaking; it is the perennial flow of language.

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

When it meows, one scarcely hears it... It has not the need of words to speak the lengthiest phraseologies.

Music has a great advantage: without mentioning anything, it can say everything.

Words are a completely different form of expression. The word P-E-N-I-S is an entirely different form of communication than a photograph of the same thing. H

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

An instrument that sometimes expresses thought, sometimes obscures thought, but most often replaces thought.

The truth [always] lies in things that have no words.

Archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information.

For me, speaking is work. It's not like when you breathe.

I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting [verbal] imagery which I guess is a poetic touch.

The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world.

We don't say nothing more. What else is there to say? Everything and nothing. You can't say everything, so you don't say nothing.