Mary Oliver Quotes
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I like books that are fat and full.
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I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
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So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.
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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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Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
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To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
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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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You can have the other words - chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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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 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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I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
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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.
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I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
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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'd rather write about polar bears than people.
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To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
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I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
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Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.
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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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You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
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I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.