Books Quotes by Mary Oliver

I like books that are fat and full.

— Mary Oliver

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

— Mary Oliver

My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.

— Mary Oliver

“The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was…

— Mary Oliver

I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.

— Mary Oliver

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable…

— Mary Oliver

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want…

— Mary Oliver

Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house…

— Mary Oliver

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that.…

— Mary Oliver

You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the…

— Mary Oliver

There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've…

— Mary Oliver

“Percy and Books Percy does not like it when I read a book. He puts his face over the top of it,…

— Mary Oliver

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that…

— Mary Oliver

“The Morning Paper Read one newspaper daily (the morning edition is the best for by evening you now that you at least…

— Mary Oliver

“Sometimes I think, were I just a little rougher made, I would go altogether to the woods—to my work entirely, and solitude,…

— Mary Oliver

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into…

— Mary Oliver

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world,…

— Mary Oliver