Mary Oliver Quotes
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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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To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
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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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I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
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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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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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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.
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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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Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
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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.
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There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.
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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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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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My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
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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 was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
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Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
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We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.
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Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
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It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
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I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.
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There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
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The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
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One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.