William Stafford on the “trajectory of significant creation”: 1/4 “Becoming a writer is just partly the learning of tricks and processes of language. Literature comes about by way of a behavior, a way of thinking, a tendency of mind and feeling.”

3/4 “Perceiving the need for that security of character is not enough—you have to possess it, and it is a gift, or something like a gift. You can’t earn it, or calculate how to get it.”

2/4 “We can all learn technique and then improvise pieces of writing again and again, but without a certain security of character we cannot sustain the vision, the trajectory of significant creation: we can learn and know and still not understand.”

4/4 “But it may come, when you enter the life of writing with patience and trust. Dawn comes, and it comes for all, but not on demand.”

“The activity of seeing Truth, then, differs from that of hunting and pursuing it. To ‘see’ Being involves a state of receptivity on the part of the soul: the soul, in short, is gazing and receiving rather than hunting or grasping.” — Andrea Nightingale