653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

I like books that are fat and full.

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

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.