Quotes from Mary Oliver

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

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.

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.

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.

Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it.

Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst.Death isn't just an idea.

Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.

Love is a lot like dancing-you just surrender to the music.

Love is when two people know everything about eachother and are still friends.

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 world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too.

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

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. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.

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

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.

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