Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Mary Oliver

Love

Life

Live

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

" Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. "

" One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished. "

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

Mary Oliver

I Believe

Art

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer. "

" 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 like books that are fat and full. "

" There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty. "

" 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

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

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

" I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things. "

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

" I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write. "

" 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. "

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