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"I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too."
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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."
"A true piece of writing sets you free."
"Through writing, an author opens the window of his heart through which a reader can see the inner self of the author."
"Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it."
"What is your advice to young writers? "Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes."
Explore more quotes by Mary Oliver
"MYSTERIES, YES Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising. How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem. Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads."
"The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you."
"A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes."
"I stood like Adam in his lonely gardenOn that first morning, shaken out of sleep,Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift."
"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. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing-that the light is everything-that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do."
"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."
"If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer."
"Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work."
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