Mary Oliver Quotes

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Mary Oliver

Profession : Poet

Birth : September 10, 1935

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

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Mary Oliver

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

Mary Oliver

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.

Mary Oliver

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

Mary Oliver

In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

Mary Oliver

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.

Mary Oliver

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.

Mary Oliver

Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.

Mary Oliver