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" 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. "

Mary Oliver

Life

You

Beach

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

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

" 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

" Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules. "

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

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

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

" Poetry is meant to be heard. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Mary Oliver

Attention

Too Much

" 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 would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "