Literary Birthday – 10 September – Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver was born on 10 September 1935 and died on 17 January 2019.
Mary Oliver Quotes
- Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
- Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
- In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
- To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
- To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
- Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
- Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
- Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
- You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.
- 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.
- I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
- Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Must-Read: 7 Bits Of Poetry Advice From Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver was an American poet. She cited Walt Whitman as an important influence. Oliver was best known for her awe-filled and often hopeful observations of nature. Her poems also explored spirituality, solitude, and the search for meaning. Lisa Ampleman wrote in America magazine that Oliver’s writing ‘became more and more spiritual’ as she grew older. Oliver won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as America’s bestselling poet. Oliver wrote several books on poetry, including A Poetry Handbook, as well as poetry collections such as A Thousand Mornings, and House of Light. Her many honours included an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a Lannan Literary Award, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. Her work continues to be widely read and admired for its clear language, close attention to nature, and sense of wonder.
Source for Photograph: Molly Malone Cook
by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar
0 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 10 September – Mary Oliver”
Writing a book (or more) is on my bucket list. At 59, I should probably find a way to DO it.