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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. "

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

" I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded. "

" Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules. "

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

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

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

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

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

" I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day. "

" 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. "

Mary Oliver

World

Alive

" I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. "

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

" I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing. "

" 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. "

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

" My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing. "

" 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. "

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

" Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. "

" 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. "

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

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

" If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like. "

" 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. "

" 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. "