Mary Oliver Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.

Mary Oliver
This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.

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

Mary Oliver
But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena's owl of wisdom and Merlin's companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind.

Mary Oliver
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us a maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force.

Mary Oliver
How many mysteries have you seen in your lifetime? How many nets pulled full over the boat's side, each silver body ready or not falling into submission? How many roses in early summer uncurling above the pale sands then falling back in unfathomable willingness? And what can you say? Glory to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the silver fish. Glory to time and the wild fields, and to joy. And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.

Mary Oliver
All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.

Mary Oliver
To write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.

Mary Oliver
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

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

Mary Oliver
I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.

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
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

Mary Oliver
And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.

Mary Oliver
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars.

Mary Oliver
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.

Mary Oliver
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...

Mary Oliver
I know death is the fascinating snake under the leaves, sliding and sliding; I know the heart loves him too, can't turn away, can't break the spell. Everything wants to enter the slow thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone.

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

Mary Oliver