Top 100 Quotes About Mary Oliver
#1. Mary Oliver: "...Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" ("The Summer Day", New and Selected Poems, 1992)
Bonnie Zieman
#2. What will you do with your one wild and precious life?" Mary Oliver
Tara Bliss
#3. '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.
Jessye Norman
#4. Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I
come to any conclusion?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace? - A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver
#5. This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.
Mary Oliver
#6. I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.
Mary Oliver
#7. We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story ...
Mary Oliver
#8. The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery.
Mary Oliver
#9. You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.
Mary Oliver
#10. A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist.
Mary Oliver
#11. 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
#12. What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
Mary Oliver
#13. I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.
Mary Oliver
#14. Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving
Mary Oliver
#15. We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.
Mary Oliver
#16. The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It
Mary Oliver
#17. Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?
Mary Oliver
#18. Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.
Mary Oliver
#19. 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
#20. Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.
Mary Oliver
#21. Things take the time they take.
Don't worry.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
Mary Oliver
#22. Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
Mary Oliver
#23. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual
Mary Oliver
#24. You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Mary Oliver
#25. And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
Mary Oliver
#26. Whatever you know about here it doesn't
tell you
Mary Oliver
#27. Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.
Mary Oliver
#28. We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.
Mary Oliver
#29. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
Mary Oliver
#30. 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
#31. The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn something by being nothing
Mary Oliver
#32. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vain-glory is the bane of us, the humans.
Mary Oliver
#33. But very little of it can do more
than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably
difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done
slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying
water in a sieve.
Mary Oliver
#34. You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Mary Oliver
#35. 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
#36. The water, that circle of shattered glass,
healed itself with a slow whisper
and lay back
Mary Oliver
#37. 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
#38. You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
Mary Oliver
#39. It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
#40. I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.
Mary Oliver
#41. And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.
Mary Oliver
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We're, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.
Mary Oliver
#46. Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
#47. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.
Mary Oliver
#48. what I wanted
was to be willing
to be afraid
Mary Oliver
#49. The sea
isn't a place
but a fact, and
a mystery ...
Mary Oliver
#50. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
#51. I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
Mary Oliver
#52. I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same
Mary Oliver
#53. When a man says he hears angels singing,
he hears angels singing.
Mary Oliver
#54. Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
Mary Oliver
#55. There is only one question: / how to love this world.
Mary Oliver
#56. Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.
Mary Oliver
#57. To leap into it and hold on, connecting everything,
Mary Oliver
#58. 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
#59. The wasp sits on the porch of her paper castle.
Mary Oliver
#60. What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?
Mary Oliver
#61. And who do you
think you are sauntering along
five feet up in the air, the ocean a blue fire
around your ankles, the sun
on your face on your shoulders its golden mouth whispering
(so it seems) you! you! you!
Mary Oliver
#62. I listen to music mostly in the evening. I've come to love what is called world music, like the Zimbabwean Oliver Mtukudzi and the Colombian singer Marta Gomez. I also love the Irish folk singer Mary Black. Other favorites include Chet Baker, Eva Cassidy, and Billie Holiday.
Jeannette Walls
#63. 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
#64. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?
Mary Oliver
#65. He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
#66. Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds.
Mary Oliver
#67. Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.
Mary Oliver
#68. It is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.
Mary Oliver
#69. When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real ...
Mary Oliver
#70. 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
#71. Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.
Mary Oliver
#72. Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
Mary Oliver
#74. Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.
Mary Oliver
#75. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.
Mary Oliver
#76. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
Mary Oliver
#77. When
When it's over, it's over, and we don't know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
I think, in my whole life, I have never missed
The full moon
or the slipper of its coming back.
Or, a kiss.
Well, yes, especially a kiss.
Mary Oliver
#78. 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
#79. I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
Mary Oliver
#80. The world has need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.
Mary Oliver
#81. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Mary Oliver
#82. Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
#84. I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and ... almost involuntary in my life.
Mary Oliver
#85. And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.
Mary Oliver
#86. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.
Mary Oliver
#87. My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness.
Mary Oliver
#88. Poems arrive ready to begin.
Poets are only the transportation.
Mary Oliver
#89. 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
#90. Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
Mary Oliver
#91. Where has this cold come from?
"It comes from the death of your friend."
Will I always, from now on, be this cold?
"No, it will diminish. But always it will be with you."
What is the reason for it?
"Wasn't your friendship always as beautiful as a flame?
Mary Oliver
#92. I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
Mary Oliver
#93. The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver
#94. 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.
Mary Oliver
#95. The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.
Mary Oliver
#96. 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
#97. Here is an amazement - once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
Mary Oliver
#98. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.
Mary Oliver
#99. 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.
Mary Oliver
#100. Winter walks up and down the town swinging his censer, but no smoke or sweetness comes from it, only the sour, metallic frankness of salt and snow.
Mary Oliver
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