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" Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together. "

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" Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response. "

Mary Oliver

Group

Strange

" I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it. "

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

" The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails. "

" Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious. "

" I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. "

" 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 it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone. "

" I'd rather write about polar bears than people. "

" I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things. "

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

" In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that. "

" Apparently, I've been considered a recluse. "

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

" You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. "

" I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all. "

Mary Oliver

Attention

Too Much

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

" I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation. "

" Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? "

" I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second. "

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

" 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. "

" I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. "

Mary Oliver

I Believe

Art

" I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings. "

" I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it. "

" So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray. "

" Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did. "

Mary Oliver

Effort

Reason

" 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 they are grateful for the good things that come along. "

" Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules. "

" 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. "

Mary Oliver

Perspective

Growing Up

" I simply do not distinguish between work and play. "