Ask Me Quotes

“You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life—

Whatever can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life— What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Poetry Its door opens near. It’s a shrine by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around, listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their gold shell. When caravans cross deserts it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“A star hit in the hills behind our house up where the grass turns brown touching the sky. Meteors have hit the world before, but this was near, and since TV; few saw, but many felt the shock. The state of California owns that land (and out from shore three miles), and any stars that come will be roped off and viewed on week days 8 to 5. A guard who took the oath of loyalty and denied any police record told me this: “If you don’t have a police record yet you could take the oath and get a job if California should be hit by another star.” “I’d promise to be loyal to California and to guard any stars that hit it,” I said, “or any place three miles out from shore, unless the star was bigger than the state—in which case, I’d be loyal to it.” But he said no exceptions were allowed, and he leaned against the state-owned meteor so calm and puffed a cork-tip cigarette that I looked down and traced with my foot in the dust and thought again and said, “OK—any star.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

— William Stafford, “Ask Me,” Ask Me; 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford (Graywolf Press, 1998)”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or the silence after lightning before it says its names—and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head— that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone. The whole wide world pours down.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Any Morning Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world. People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy. Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around, can be picked up and saved. People won’t even see that you have them, they are so light and easy to hide. Later in the day you can act like the others. You can shake your head. You can frown.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn’t hear it—I breathed it into my ears. Little”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

— William Stafford, “Ask Me,” Ask Me; 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford (Graywolf Press, January 7th 2014)”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“This monument is for the unknown good in our enemies. Like a picture their life began to appear: they gathered at home in the evening and sang. Above their fields they saw a new sky. A holiday came and they carried the baby to the park for a party. Sunlight surrounded them. Here we glimpse what our minds long turned away from. The great mutual blindness darkened that sunlight in the park, and the sky that was new, and the holidays. This monument says that one afternoon we stood here letting a part of our minds escape. They came back, but different. Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life. This monument is for you.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“We stood by the library. It was an August night. Priests and sisters of hundreds of unsaid creeds passed us going their separate pondered roads. We watched them cross under the corner light. Freights on the edge of town were carrying away flatcars of steel to be made into secret guns; we knew, being human, that they were enemy guns, and we were somehow vowed to poverty. No one stopped or looked long or held out a hand. They were following orders received from hour to hour, so many signals, all strange, from a foreign power: But tomorrow, you whispered, peace may flow over the land. At that corner in a flash of lightning we two stood; that glimpse we had will stare through the dark forever: on the poorest roads we would be walkers and beggars, toward some deathless meeting involving a crust of bread.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Lorene—we thought she’d come home. But it got late, and then days. Now it has been years. Why shouldn’t she, if she wanted? I would: something comes along, a sunny day, you start walking; you meet a person who says, “Follow me,” and things lead on. Usually, it wouldn’t happen, but sometimes the neighbors notice your car is gone, the patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades. They forget. In the Bible it happened—fishermen, Levites. They just went away and kept going. Thomas, away off in India, never came back. But Lorene—it was a stranger maybe, and he said, “Your life, I need it.” And nobody else did.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why. If you do not have things right in your life you will be overwhelmed: you may be heroic, but you will not be wise. If you have things right in your life but do not know why, you are just lucky, and you will not move in the little ways that encourage good fortune.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Most mornings I get away, slip out the door before light, set forth on the dim, gray road, letting my feet find a cadence that softly carries me on. Nobody is up—all alone my journey begins. Some”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford

“Assurance You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or the silence after lightning before it says its names—and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head— that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone. The whole wide world pours down.”
― William Stafford, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford