Mary Oliver

“I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.”

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.”

“The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe.”

“We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.”

“Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.”

“A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist.”

“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.”

“I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.”

“Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!What a taskto askof anything, or anyone,yet it is ours,and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.”

“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.”

“GOING TO WALDEN It isn't very far as highways lie. I might be back by nightfall, having seen The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water. Friends argue that I might be wiser for it. They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: How dull we grow from hurrying here and there! Many have gone, and think me half a fool To miss a day away in the cool country. Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish, Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.”

“I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.”

“When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.”

“And I say to my heart: rave on.”

“What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?”

“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, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.”

“... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.”

“The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.”

“My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.”

“One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.”

“I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.”

“I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.”

“It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.”

“All my lifeI have been restless--I have felt there is somethingmore wonderful than gloss--than wholeness--than staying at home.”

“I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.”

“I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.”

“When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it’s going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body as a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. [from the poem "When Death Comes"]”

“I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.”

“Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.”

“In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.”

“You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.”

“We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.”

“It was not a choice of writing or not writing. It was a choice of loving my life or not loving my life. To keep writing was always a first priority.... I worked probably 25 years by myself.... Just writing and working, not trying to publish much. Not giving readings. A longer time than people really are willing to commit before they want to go public.”

“Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?”

“Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.”

“It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.”

“Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.”

“...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.”

“...whoever you are, not 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.”

“Invention hovers always a little above the rules.”

“I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.”

“And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.”

“Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.”

“maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--”

“I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.”

“And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.”

“You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.”