Mary Oliver Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

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

Mary Oliver
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Mary Oliver
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

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

Mary Oliver
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention...

Mary Oliver
Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

Mary Oliver
You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

Mary Oliver
Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

Mary Oliver
Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?

Mary Oliver
Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective.

Mary Oliver
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.

Mary Oliver
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
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
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
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
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
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.

Mary Oliver
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
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.

Mary Oliver
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
The poet dreams of the classroom I dreamed I stood up in class And I said aloud: Teacher, Why is algebra important? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up And I said: Teacher, I'm weary of the turkeys That we have to draw every fall. May I draw a fox instead? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up once more and said: Teacher, My heart is falling asleep And it wants to wake up. It needs to be outside. Sit down, he said.

Mary Oliver
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

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

Mary Oliver
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
No poem is about one of us, or some of us, but is about all of us. It is part of a long document about the species. Every poem is about my life but also it is about your life, and a hundred thousand lives to come. That one person wrote it is not nearly so important or so interesting as that it pertains to us all.

Mary Oliver
If the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.

Mary Oliver
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

Mary Oliver
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
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
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