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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. "

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" 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. "

Mary Oliver

People

Children

Know

" 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. "

" Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" Poetry is meant to be heard. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

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

" 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 like books that are fat and full. "

" 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. "

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

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