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Mary Oliver
32 quotes
“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Am I not among the early risers and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light? Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything?”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is where it -- you are alone in your head, you are all alone inside your brain. and that makes it impossible to believe that anything, everything and anyone that you own, love or hateis real. we will never know if we are living or dreaming.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know what God is. I don't know what death is.But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn't amuse me. Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God,one of which was you.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that and the years before that you were not.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function — to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory to the world, that good teacher.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source