Mary Oliver Quotes

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.

With any kind of sci-fi, the imagination continues, and the world exists, and you create that in your own mind, and it lives in you.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Images adorn our inner life and carry great power there.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.

When I was a little boy, I was reading Dante and I was saying to myself 'Bravo, Dante, Bravo.' It's so beautiful, the music, the sound, the meaning. I felt like calling him by phone, like a friend.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.