Mary Oliver

“People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.”

“I like books that are fat and full.”

“So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“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...”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Poetry is meant to be heard.”

“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 m...”

“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 function...”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.”