Zitat des Tages von Mary Oliver:
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.
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.
My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper 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.
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
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.
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.
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
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.
I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
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.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
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.
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.
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.
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
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 know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
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.
I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
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.