Mary Oliver Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
Every year everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side
is salvation

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

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

Mary Oliver
A fact: one picks it up and reads it, and puts it down, and there is an end to it. But an idea! That one may pick up, and reflect upon, and oppose, and expand, and so pass a delightful afternoon altogether.

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

Mary Oliver
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.

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

Mary Oliver
For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.

Mary Oliver
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

Mary Oliver
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

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
After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

Mary Oliver
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
So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

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

Mary Oliver
Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.

Mary Oliver
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
What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.

Mary Oliver
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things

Mary Oliver
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.

Mary Oliver
And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.

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

Mary Oliver