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
writing wanted
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
power want littles
Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
somewhere-else water want
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
real want wonder
When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real....
want precious-life
Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
trying break-out want
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.
trying together want
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.
littles alive wanted
I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.
people want fancy
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
letting-go rain want
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
mistake world want
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
children want fields
And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.
world weight want
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
world want this-world
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.