Mary Oliver Quotes
...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.
Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.
This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
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.
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
Things take the time they take. don't worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist.
Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?
Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
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 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.
My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.