Mary Oliver - Language is, in other words, not necessary, but volun

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

Topics

Citations

Oliver, Mary. Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Da Capo Press, 2004, p. 33.

Related Quotes

Quincy Jones

A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.

William Shatner

Well-written words are music.

Jean Marais

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Khalil Gibran

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Ellen Hopkins

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

Toni Collette

I can't imagine a world without music.

W. S. Merwin

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

Ethan Canin

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Kevin Powers

In a lot of ways, the task at hand for any poem is to approach something that defies exactness or definition with a kind of exactness or precision.

Tom Waits

Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing
with the air.

Nikki Giovanni

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

May Sarton

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

Catherine Opie

Language is a very complicated thing, and that's one of the reasons why I like making photographs.

Bernard Meltzer

The beautiful in life...
Some talk of it in poetry,
Some grow it from the soil,
Some build it in a steeple,
Some show it through their toil.
Some breathe it into music,
Some mold it into art,
Some shape it into bread loaves...
Some hold it in their hearts.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

Rene Char

A poem is the realization of love. . . .

Charles Dickens

Why then we should drop into poetry.

Chuck Mangione

Music is meant to be a beautiful thing.

Jake Shimabukuro

You know, I think music is very interactive. It's a - it's a language.

Pat Conroy

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Joseph Roux

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the purity of passion - the passion that builds every home and fills the world with art and song.

David Lynch

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

Plato

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

About the Author

Mary Oliver

Born: September 10, 1935
Died: January 17, 2019
Nationality: American
Profession: Poet

Biography

Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterised by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007 she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.

Related Authors

Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings, Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman

Mary Oliver Quotes