653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

One learns by thinking about writing, and by talkingabout writing-but primarily through writing.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least insuburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve.

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies—in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicatea preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world—among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think—no, you will realize—that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

I try to remember when time's measurepainfully chafes, for instance when autumnflares out at the last, boisterous and like us longingto stay - how everything lives, shiftingfrom one bright vision to another, foreverin these momentary pastures.

You’re like a little wild thingthat was never sent to school.

The Morning PaperRead one newspaper daily (the morning editionis the bestfor by evening you now that you at leasthave lived through another day)and let the disasters, the unbelievableyet approved decisionssoak in.I don't need to name the countries, ours among them.What keeps us from falling down, our facesto the ground; ashamed, ashamed?

Let them imitate and imitate - and learn and learn....who has not seen a young painter in a museum intently copying a Vermeer or a van Gogh, and believing himself on the way to learning something valuable?Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one's work - are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as the inspired, get there.