Quotations

"A thread well-followed, gently, will lead you to the center of the universe."

— William Stafford, American poet, born 1914

"If everyone had standards as low as those I have, no one would have writer’s block."

— William Stafford, American poet, born 1914

"For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."

— William Stafford, American poet, born 1914

"I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again."

— William Stafford, American poet, born 1914

"Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god; below the 60th no common sense and below the 70th no intelligence whatsoever."

— Kim Stanley, American actress, born 1925

"An excess of reason is itself a form of madness."

— Kim Stanley, American actress, born 1925

"It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history."

— Kim Stanley, American actress, born 1925

"Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind."

— Kim Stanley, American actress, born 1925

"The boy's got a lot to learn and I've got a lot to teach."

— Barbara Stanwyck, American actress, born 1907

"The more you kick something that's dead, the worse it smells."

— Barbara Stanwyck, American actress, born 1907

"My only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth."

— Barbara Stanwyck, American actress, born 1907

"The driving force of drama is the dark side."

— Barbara Steele, English actress, born 1937

"Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product."

— Edward Steichen, American photographer, died March 25, 1973

"I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself."

— Edward Steichen, American photographer, born March 27, 1879