I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps?” — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“Of course! the path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world,… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“The Uses Of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“Certainly imagery can be gleaned from the industrial world — what do Blake's "dark Satanic Mills," for example, owe to the natural… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
The poet dreams of the classroom I dreamed I stood up in class And I said aloud: Teacher, Why is algebra important?… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness. I would be a fox, or… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“from Hum, Hum Oh the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows and whoever lives there, little by little,… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world,… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“The Poet With His Face In His Hands You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“THE POETRY TEACHER The university gave me a new, elegant classroom to teach in. Only one thing, they said. You can’t bring… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die.… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“Blossom In April the ponds open like black blossoms, the moon swims in every one; there’s fire everywhere: frogs shouting their desire,… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“How I go to the wood Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“yoga soul today. instant resonation. Spring Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“I Worried" I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“because my life without you would be a place of parched and broken trees” — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
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… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“All important ideas must include the trees, the mountains, and the rivers. • To understand many things you must reach out of your own condition.” — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“Sometimes I think, were I just a little rougher made, I would go altogether to the woods—to my work entirely, and solitude, a few… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
“First Snow The snow began here this morning and all day continued, its white rhetoric everywhere calling us back to why, how, whence such beauty… — mary oliver Copy Share Image
“What can I say that I have not said before? So I’ll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow… — Mary Oliver Copy Share Image
