H.P. Oliver Quotes

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.

She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.

Some things are better left buried and forgotten.

There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass.

The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface. Love.

If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.

Nothing exists but him.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart.

And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.

But that's the problem with love - it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control.

This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.

That's the easy thing about falling: there is only one choice after that.

But from the beginning, I knew that in a world where destiny was dead, I was destined, forever, to love him. Even though he didn't - though he couldn't - ever love me back.

Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?

What my daughter does is my own responsibility, the way she represents herself.

So every day So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?

A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry.

When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

I grew up in a sad, depressed place. I got out. Poetry saved my life.

Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.

The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.

... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.

A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.

I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.

Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?

To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.

Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second. And in America, we have it backwards.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.

... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.

Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.

Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.

And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.