top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more Reading quotes
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
"I read a lot, but I read about the areas that I'm interested in."
"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."
"You hit somebody with your fist and not with your fingers spread."
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
"You must pay for your sins. If you have already paid, please ignore this notice."
Explore more quotes by Mary Oliver
"I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple - or a green field - a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing - an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness -wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak -to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed."
"I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalive for a little while."
"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 well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?"
"I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think-no, you will realize-that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying."
"Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth."
"I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it."
"The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. Full tonight.So we goand the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit,I thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty and also, oh! How richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up intomy face. As though I werehis perfect moon."
"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."
"Love, love, love, says Percy.And hurry as fast as you canalong the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.Then, go to sleep.Give up your body heat, your beating heart.Then, trust."
bottom of page