Mary Oliver Quotes
-
Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
-
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
-
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
-
Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.
-
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
-
I like books that are fat and full.
-
I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
-
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
-
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
-
Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
-
You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
-
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
-
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
-
Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
-
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
-
then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that and the years before that you were not.
-
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
-
What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
-
I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
-
I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
-
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
-
The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails.
-
And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful - how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.
-
Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.