Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliveris an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth10 September 1935
CityMaple Heights, OH
CountryUnited States of America
looks hook
I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.
crafts poet interest
A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.
writing heart skills
Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.
teacher writing best-teacher
... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
stories
We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story...
adjectives-and-adverbs fifty cents
Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.
people creative world
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
different accurate new-words
To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.
real want wonder
When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real....
culture creatures
All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.
ideas afternoon may
A fact: one picks it up and reads it, and puts it down, and there is an end to it. But an idea! That one may pick up, and reflect upon, and oppose, and expand, and so pass a delightful afternoon altogether.
dream song heart
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.
blood wings bird
But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena's owl of wisdom and Merlin's companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind.
want precious-life
Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?