Mary Oliver Quotes
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But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.
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Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
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I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
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I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
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Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.
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I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
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I like books that are fat and full.
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Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
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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.
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Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
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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.
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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.
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You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
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then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that and the years before that you were not.
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I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
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Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
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What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
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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.
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
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I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
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I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
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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.
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So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.