Mary Oliver Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“I'd rather write about polar bears than people.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I like books that are fat and full.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.”