Long Life: Essays and Other Writings Book

This collection of 14 short essays, 10 poems and some other writings makes me wish that Mary Oliver (wonderful poet that she is) would write more prose. Insightful, rich in detail, and celebratory, her essays address nature, landscape, Emerson, Hawthorne, the disappearance of the town dump, life and writing in wonderful sentences.

"Poe claimed he could hear the night darkness as it poured, in the evening, into the world. I remember this now and think, reversing the hour but not the idea, that I will hear some sound of the morning as it settles upward. What I hear, though, is no such sprawling and powerful anthem, as it would have to be, but the rustling of a flock of snow buntings, high and wild in the cold air...."

"And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company."

"Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased."

"I prefer weather in the smallest quantities. A drop will do.....We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions--even to a certainty--as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee's wings. This, too, I suggest, is weather, and worthy of report."

"Now he [Emerson] is only within the wider, immeasurable world of our thoughts. He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page."

"The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament."

"...it presupposes the heart's spiritual awakening as the true work of our lives."

"It's best to write, to begin with, generously."

"The ants rush toward sweetness. I take away the melon, but first I spill a little melon juice on the counter."

"When in the distance the town clock tapped out its brief news--Ah, three o'clock, I thought involuntarily, and felt one or two grains of my spirit die."

"What would it be to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?"

"I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping. Toward morning the rain slowed. I dressed and hurried out into the world."

"In nature what looks like ornamentation is always of the greatest utility."