Top 44 Mary Oliver Quotes

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 had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.

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.

I’d rather write about polar bears than people.

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.

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

I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.

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

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.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don’t want fancy work.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Apparently, I’ve been considered a recluse.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.

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.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.

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

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

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.

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.

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 grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

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.

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

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.

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.