Mary Oliver Quotes
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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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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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To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
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Poetry is meant to be heard.
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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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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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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 think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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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 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 was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in 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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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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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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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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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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My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
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Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
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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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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 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.