Top 100 Mary Oliver Quotes
#1. You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.
Mary Oliver
#2. I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
Mary Oliver
#3. Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
Mary Oliver
#4. Whatever you know about here it doesn't
tell you
Mary Oliver
#5. And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness - of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.
Mary Oliver
#6. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vain-glory is the bane of us, the humans.
Mary Oliver
#7. Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Mary Oliver
#8. You may not agree, you may not care, but
if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world - and there are plenty - very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.
Mary Oliver
#9. It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
#10. But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.
Mary Oliver
#11. I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines ...
I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.
(from poem, "Five A.M. in the Pinewoods")
Mary Oliver
#12. what I wanted
was to be willing
to be afraid
Mary Oliver
#13. Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl.
Mary Oliver
#14. What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?
Mary Oliver
#15. Every year everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation
Mary Oliver
#16. A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Mary Oliver
#17. Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.
Mary Oliver
#18. And that is just the point ... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?
Mary Oliver
#20. I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and ... almost involuntary in my life.
Mary Oliver
#21. Poems arrive ready to begin.
Poets are only the transportation.
Mary Oliver
#22. And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real
Mary Oliver
#23. The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver
#24. It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
Mary Oliver
#25. And maybe there will be,
after all,
some slack and perfectly balanced
blind and rough peace, finally,
in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools after all that
falling?
Mary Oliver
#26. I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.
Mary Oliver
#27. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
Mary Oliver
#28. For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
"Don't love you life
too much," it said,
and vanished
into the world.
Mary Oliver
#29. The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.
While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.
Mary Oliver
#31. Listen, whatever you see and love
that's where you are.
Mary Oliver
#32. Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
Mary Oliver
#33. I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
Mary Oliver
#34. And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
-from The Buddha's Last Instruction
Mary Oliver
#35. Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields ... Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
Mary Oliver
#36. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.
Mary Oliver
#37. There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
Mary Oliver
#38. Did I actually reach out my arms
toward it, toward paradise falling, like
the fading of the dearest, wildest hope-
the dark heart of the story that is all
the reason for its telling?
Mary Oliver
#39. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Mary Oliver
#40. Our hands, or minds, our feet hold more intelligence. With this I have no quarrel.
But, what about virtue?
Mary Oliver
#41. Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing - the reason they can fly.
Mary Oliver
#42. All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.
Mary Oliver
#43. But how did you come burning down like a wild needle, knowing just where my heart was?
Mary Oliver
#44. As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
Mary Oliver
#45. What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers?
Mary Oliver
#46. I guess
she was so busy with her own happiness
she had grown careless
and was just wandering along
listening
to the wind as she leaned down
to lip the sweetness.
Mary Oliver
#47. This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water
and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to
where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else
which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.
Mary Oliver
#48. I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it ...
Mary Oliver
#49. How could there be a day in your whole life that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
Mary Oliver
#50. Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.
Mary Oliver
#51. I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
Mary Oliver
#52. The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.
Mary Oliver
#53. I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
Mary Oliver
#54. Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
Mary Oliver
#55. The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
Mary Oliver
#56. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
Mary Oliver
#57. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
Mary Oliver
#58. Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
Mary Oliver
#59. I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us ...
Mary Oliver
#60. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Mary Oliver
#61. The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change.
Mary Oliver
#62. I know death is the fascinating snake under the leaves, sliding and sliding; I know the heart loves him too, can't turn away, can't break the spell. Everything wants to enter the slow thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone.
Mary Oliver
#63. Until I came and saw the water falling,
its lace legs and its womanly arms sheeting down,
while something howled like thunder,
over the rocks,
all day and all night -
unspooling.
Mary Oliver
#64. A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.
Mary Oliver
#65. My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
Mary Oliver
#66. Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
Mary Oliver
#68. Who knows what will happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
Mary Oliver
#69. And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, that is better than these light-filled bodies?
Mary Oliver
#70. Life is much the same when it's going well
resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
Mary Oliver
#71. At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
Mary Oliver
#72. People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Mary Oliver
#73. Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.
Mary Oliver
#74. Invention hovers always a little above the rules.
Mary Oliver
#75. There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.
Mary Oliver
#76. No, I'd never been to this country
before. No, I didn't know where the roads
would lead me. No, I didn't intend to
turn back.
Mary Oliver
#77. Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
Mary Oliver
#78. 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.
Mary Oliver
#79. I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver
#80. It does no good to bark at the television,
I said. I've tried it too. So he stopped.
Mary Oliver
#81. Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.
Mary Oliver
#82. It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
Mary Oliver
#83. they won't be false and they won't be true,
but hey'll be real.
Mary Oliver
#84. When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.
Mary Oliver
#86. Attention without feeling
is only a report.
Mary Oliver
#87. we are all one family but love ourselves best.
Mary Oliver
#88. The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.
Mary Oliver
#89. One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began ...
Mary Oliver
#90. And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
Mary Oliver
#91. I have a little dog who likes to nap with me.
He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck.
He is sweeter than soap.
He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace,
which can't even bark ...
Mary Oliver
#92. Therefore, dark past,
I'm about to do it.
I'm about to forgive you
for everything.
Mary Oliver
#93. Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them.
Mary Oliver
#94. who would cry out to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married to the vivacity of what will be?
Mary Oliver
#95. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? Would would this would be like without dogs?
Mary Oliver
#96. Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
Mary Oliver
#97. I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
Mary Oliver
#98. I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.
Mary Oliver
#99. Now and again there's a moment,
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.
Mary Oliver
#100. A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.
Mary Oliver
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