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.
Category Archive: Mary Oliver
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and… almost involuntary in my life.
I’d rather write about polar bears than people.
Apparently, I’ve been considered a recluse.
I like books that are fat and full.
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
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.