"Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite."
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Quote collection
Mary Oliver quotes (page 14 of 14)
280 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write."
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"Tom Dancer’s gift of a whitebark pine cone You never know What opportunity Is going to travel to you, Or through you. Once a friend gave me A small pine cone- One of a few He found in the scat Of a grizzly In Utah maybe, Or Wyoming. I took it home And did what I supposed He was sure I would do- I ate it, Thinking How it had traveled Through that rough And holy body. It was crisp and sweet. It was almost a prayer Without words. My gratitude, Tom Dancer, For this gift of the world I adore so much And want to belong to. And thank you too, great bear"
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"People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work."
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"One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear."
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"And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier."
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"Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together."
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"At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?"
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"For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me."
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"Poetry is a life-cherishing force."
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"I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea."
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"The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things"
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"And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real"
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"I know many lives worth living."
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"I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings."
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"I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else."
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"If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer."
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"I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back."
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"Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty."
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"The language of the poem is the language of particulars."
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