-
I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
Mary Oliver -
I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
Mary Oliver
-
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.
Mary Oliver -
Poetry is meant to be heard.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver -
I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver
-
Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver -
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver -
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver -
My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
Mary Oliver
-
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver -
I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver -
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver
-
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.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver -
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver -
I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
Mary Oliver