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Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver
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Mary Oliver
Age: 83 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: January 17
Climate Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maple Heights
Ohio
Mary Jane Oliver
Originals
Original
Began
Poetry
Fine
Within
Art
Wilderness
Earth
Arts
More quotes by Mary Oliver
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
Mary Oliver
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Mary Oliver
Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.
Mary Oliver
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
Mary Oliver
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
Mary Oliver
The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward it can give gifts or withhold all it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.
Mary Oliver
Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
Mary Oliver
I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Mary Oliver
Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Mary Oliver
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.
Mary Oliver
We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
Mary Oliver
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
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
Mary Oliver
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver
I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.
Mary Oliver
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
Mary Oliver
We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere there are many surprises yet to come.
Mary Oliver
Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver
