To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
Category Archive: Mary Oliver
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 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.
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 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.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
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.