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.
Category Archive: Mary Oliver
My parents didn’t care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
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.
I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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 read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.