Mary Oliver Quotes

Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

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.

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine

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.

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

...Sometimes I dream that everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly, and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness- and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

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

When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms, thinking of nothing, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth; all day my body accepts what it is. In the dark creeks that run by there is this thick paw of my life darting among the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue.

I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields, yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head and her wet nose touching the face of every one with its petals of silk with its fragrance rising into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen hovered - and easily she adored every blossom not in the serious careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom the way we praise or don't praise - the way we love or don't love - but the way we long to be - that happy in the heaven of earth - that wild, that loving.

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing.

Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

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

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.

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.

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.

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

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.

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

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?

I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.

The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinking of sitting out on the sand to watch the moon rise. Full tonight. So we go and the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think about time and space, makes me take measure of myself: one iota pondering heaven. Thus we sit, I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. As though I were his perfect moon.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

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

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

As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.

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

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.

I like books that are fat and full.

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. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.

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.

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

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.

I'd rather write about polar bears than people.

Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?

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.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

There is only one question: / how to love this world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

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.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

from the complications of loving you i think there is no end or return. no answer, no coming out of it. which is the only way to love, isn't it? this isn't a playground, this is earth, our heaven, for a while. therefore i have given precedence to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods that hold you in the center of my world. and i say to my body: grow thinner still. and i say to my fingers, type me a pretty song. and i say to my heart: rave on.

Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.

I grew up in a sad, depressed place. I got out. Poetry saved my life.

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.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

Things take the time they take. don't worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?

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.