If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.

Swan, by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.

I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

Pigeon-holes are only comfortable for pigeons.