Mary Oliver Quotes

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

What drives the creative person is that we see it all.

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.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

An artist looks at a juice bottle, an egg carton, or a newspaper and sees something valuable in them.

An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting.

It's an artist's job to always have their antennas up.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

The greatest ideas, the most profound thoughts, and the most beautiful poetry are born from the womb of silence

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.