Quotes by Mary Oliver
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I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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.
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
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.
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 spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.
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.
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
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.
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.
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.
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
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.
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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.
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.
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