Mary Oliver - New and Selected Poems (1992)

23 Sourced Quotes

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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
Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again... wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.

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

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

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

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

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
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

Mary Oliver
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

Mary Oliver
And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

Mary Oliver
Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly

Mary Oliver
Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

Mary Oliver
At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?

Mary Oliver
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

Mary Oliver
A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them... A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing...

Mary Oliver