Mary Oliver Quotes
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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 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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I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
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Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
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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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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'd rather write about polar bears than people.
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I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
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Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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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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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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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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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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I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
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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 fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
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At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
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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.
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The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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Poetry is meant to be heard.
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I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.