Mary Oliver Quotes
Mary Oliver is one of the most celebrated contemporary poets in the United States. She has published over twenty books of poetry and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her book “American Primitive”. Oliver’s work often explores themes of nature, spirituality and aging. Her writing is renowned for its lyricism, depth and simplicity. Here are some of the best quotes from Mary Oliver that will uplift and inspire you.
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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.
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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.
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I’d rather write about polar bears than people.
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I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
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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.
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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.
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Writers must… take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.
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Apparently, I’ve been considered a recluse.
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I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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August of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sun and the lilies again are spread across the water.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
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I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don’t want fancy work.
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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My parents didn’t care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
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I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
Mary Oliver
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I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
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I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
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I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
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One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
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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.
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So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
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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.
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My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It’s early work, derivative work.
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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.
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Poetry is meant to be heard.
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I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
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Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
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I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are – they sort of tap dance through it.
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I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
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I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and… almost involuntary in my life.
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I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
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I always feel that whatever isn’t necessary shouldn’t be in a poem.
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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.
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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.
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I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
Mary Oliver
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Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.
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You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.
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I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
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In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
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I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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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.
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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.
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I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
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To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
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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.
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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.
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Words have not only a definition… but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
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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.
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To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
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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.
Mary Oliver
