Mary Oliver

I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did.

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.