Mary Oliver Want Quotations

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.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

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.

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.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

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.

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.

Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?

When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real....

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.