Mary Oliver Quotes
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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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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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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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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I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
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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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I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
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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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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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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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Poetry is meant to be heard.
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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 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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I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
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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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Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
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My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
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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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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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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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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 am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.