"I love the line of Flaubert about..." - Quote by Mary Oliver
I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
More by Mary Oliver
“The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.”
“I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.”
“In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.”
More on Writing
“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
“. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .”
“How can you contrive to write so even?”
More on Observation
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
“Electricity is really just organized lightning.”
“Divers philosophers hold that the lips is parcel of the mouth.”