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" As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. "

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" 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

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

" Poetry is meant to be heard. "

" To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. "

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

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

" There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay. "

" 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. "

" Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules. "

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

Mary Oliver

Attention

Too Much

" To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. "

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

" To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example. "

Mary Oliver

Believe

You

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

Mary Oliver

I Believe

Art

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

" When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about. "

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

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

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

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

" Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them. "

" To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it. "

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

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