"Poetry is a serious business; literature is..." - Quote by Mary Oliver
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
More by Mary Oliver
“Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.”
“And now I understand something so frightening &wonderful- how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.”
“Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.”
More on Poetry
“All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.”
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”
“Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.”
More on Literature
“Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas”
“Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.”
“It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”