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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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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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 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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I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
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Poetry is meant to be heard.
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Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
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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 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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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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To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
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Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
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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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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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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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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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Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.
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If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
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I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
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Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
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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.