Mary Oliver
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.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Truth
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?Collection: Life
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.Collection: Life
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.Collection: Work
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.Collection: Morning
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.Collection: Work
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.Collection: Art
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Life
I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.Collection: Family
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.Collection: Poetry
Poetry is meant to be heard.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Good
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Happiness
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.Collection: Poetry
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
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.
You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.
In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
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.
I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
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.
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
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.
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.
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for 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.
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 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.
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
I like books that are fat and full.
I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
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 have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.
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.
I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.