"People want poetry. They need poetry. They..." - Quote by Mary Oliver
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
More by Mary Oliver
“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.”
“What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?”
“Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.”
More on Poetry
“The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.”
“We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.”
“Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.”
More on Simplicity
“Long hair minimizes the need for barbers; socks can be done without; one leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years; suspenders are superfluous.”
“I've travelled all around the world to see the rivers and the mountains, and I've spent a lot of money. I have gone to great lengths, I have seen everything, but I forgot to see just outside my house a dewdrop on a little blade of grass, a dewdrop which reflects in its convexity the whole universe around you.”
“I think it's a universal truth that most chefs I know are happiest eating simple, unadorned good things.”