Top 313 Quotes & Sayings by Mary Oliver
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Mary Oliver.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
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.
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
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.
Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
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.
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.
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.
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.
I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
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.
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Poetry is meant to be heard.
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
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.
I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
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.
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
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.
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
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.
My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
I like books that are fat and full.
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
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.
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.
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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.
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
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