Mary Oliver Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too.

Mary Oliver
I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.

Mary Oliver
Can one be passionate about the just, the ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit no labor in its cause? I don't think so. All summations have a beginning, all effect has a story, all kindness beings with the sown seed. Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action. Be ignited or be gone.

Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness

Mary Oliver
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

Mary Oliver
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.

Mary Oliver
In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

Mary Oliver
I have a little dog who likes to nap with me. He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck. He is sweeter than soap. He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace, which can't even bark...

Mary Oliver
There is only one question: how to love this world.

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

Mary Oliver
Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

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

Mary Oliver
Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.

Mary Oliver