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Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver -
I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
Mary Oliver -
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled - to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
Mary Oliver -
If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Mary Oliver -
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver -
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.
Mary Oliver
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
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.
Mary Oliver -
I don't know what God is. I don't know what death is. But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.
Mary Oliver -
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Mary Oliver -
Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did.
Mary Oliver -
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness
Mary Oliver
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I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.
Mary Oliver -
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
Mary Oliver -
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Mary Oliver -
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
Mary Oliver -
In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
Mary Oliver -
Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.
Mary Oliver