Mary Oliver Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real....

Mary Oliver
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving

Mary Oliver
A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry.

Mary Oliver
What can we do about God, who makes and then breaks every god-forsaken, beautiful day?

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
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.

Mary Oliver
Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

Mary Oliver
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.

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
But how did you come burning down like a wild needle, knowing just where my heart was?

Mary Oliver
In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

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
We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.

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
Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement--how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday!

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

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

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

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
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