Mary Oliver Quotes & Sayings

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings. — 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

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.
When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. — Mary Oliver

There are things you can't reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open. — Mary Oliver

Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life. — Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began ... — Mary Oliver

I HAVE DECIDED I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It's said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I'm not talking about a vacation. Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. Are you following me? — Mary Oliver

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours. — Mary Oliver

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

When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. — Mary Oliver

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water
and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to
where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else
which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself. — Mary Oliver

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else. — Mary Oliver

As music is present yet you can't touch it. — Mary Oliver

Oh the house of denial has thick walls
and very small windows
and whoever lives there, little by little,
will turn to stone.
In those years I did everything I could do
and I did it in the dark
I mean, without understanding.
I ran away.
I ran away again
(from poem: Hum, Hum) — Mary Oliver

All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing — Mary Oliver

I Worried
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally 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

Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness. — Mary Oliver

The wasp sits on the porch of her paper castle. — Mary Oliver

On the beach, at dawn: Four small stones clearly Hugging each other. How many kinds of love Might there be in the world, And how many formations might they make And who am I ever To imagine I could know Such a marvelous business? When the sun broke It poured willingly its light Over the stones That did not move, not at all, Just as, to its always generous term, It shed its light on me, My own body that loves, Equally, to hug another body. — Mary Oliver

And who do you
think you are sauntering along
five feet up in the air, the ocean a blue fire
around your ankles, the sun
on your face on your shoulders its golden mouth whispering
(so it seems) you! you! you! — Mary Oliver

My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums ... — Mary Oliver

Belief isn't always easy.
But this much I have learned
if not enough else
to live with my eyes open. — 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

You do not own the rain, or the
trees, or the laws which pertain to them. — Mary Oliver

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. — Mary Oliver

It's not a competition, it's a doorway. — Mary Oliver

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her - her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love. — 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

Sleep comes its little while. Then I wake in the valley of midnight or three a.m. to the first fragrances of spring which is coming, all by itself, no matter what. My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have. My body says, will this pounding ever stop? My heart says: there, there, be a good student. My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle those soft white flowers, open in the night. — 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

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

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

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it. — Mary Oliver

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

Tom Dancer's gift of a whitebark pine cone

You never know
What opportunity
Is going to travel to you,
Or through you.

Once a friend gave me
A small pine cone-
One of a few
He found in the scat

Of a grizzly
In Utah maybe,
Or Wyoming.
I took it home

And did what I supposed
He was sure I would do-
I ate it,
Thinking

How it had traveled
Through that rough
And holy body.
It was crisp and sweet.

It was almost a prayer
Without words.
My gratitude, Tom Dancer,
For this gift of the world
I adore so much
And want to belong to.
And thank you too, great bear — Mary Oliver

You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion. — Mary Oliver

I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage. — Mary Oliver

There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty. — Mary Oliver

Words have not only a definition ... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound. — Mary Oliver

I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. — Mary Oliver

What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? Would would this would be like without dogs? — 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

Okay, I said. But remember, you can't fix
everything in the world for everybody.
"However," said Ricky, "you can't do
anything at all unless you begin. Haven't
I heard you say that once or twice, or
maybe a hundred times? — Mary Oliver

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

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places? — 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

To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air. — Mary Oliver

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

TIDES Every day the sea blue gray green lavender pulls away leaving the harbor's dark-cobbled undercoat slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls walk there among old whalebones, the white spines of fish blink from the strandy stew as the hours tick over; and then far out the faint, sheer line turns, rustling over the slack, the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over the clam beds, slippery logs, barnacle-studded stones, dragging the shining sheets forward, deepening, pushing, wreathing together wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures spilling over themselves, lapping blue gray green lavender, never resting, not ever but fashioning shore, continent, everything. And here you may find me on almost any morning walking along the shore so light-footed so casual. — Mary Oliver

I simply do not distinguish between work and play. — Mary Oliver

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

Turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city-
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,
to a life of the imagination. — Mary Oliver

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us. — Mary Oliver

Everything that was broken has
forgotten its brokenness. I live
now in a sky-house, through every
window the sun. Also your presence.
Our touching, our stories. Earthy
and holy both. How can this be, but
it is. Every day has something in
it whose name is Forever. — Mary Oliver

they won't be false and they won't be true,
but hey'll be real. — Mary Oliver

I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession ... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. — 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

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever? — 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

When death comes ... .
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what it's going to be like, that cottage of darkness? — Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate) — Mary Oliver

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

But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. — Mary Oliver

And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness - of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around. — Mary Oliver

Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you. — Mary Oliver

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs. — Mary Oliver

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

May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. — Mary Oliver

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I'll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.
(from, "What Can I Say") — Mary Oliver

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

That your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we - so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained - are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many. — Mary Oliver

Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. — Mary Oliver

M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic.
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the 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. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together. — Mary Oliver

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response. — Mary Oliver

The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language. — Mary Oliver

Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite. — Mary Oliver

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means.
But nobody is asking, How does it feel? — 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

Let them imitate and imitate - and learn and learn.
... who has not seen a young painter in a museum intently copying a Vermeer or a van Gogh, and believing himself on the way to learning something valuable?
Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one's work - are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as the inspired, get there. — Mary Oliver

The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery. — Mary Oliver

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing. — Mary Oliver

When
When it's over, it's over, and we don't know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
I think, in my whole life, I have never missed
The full moon
or the slipper of its coming back.
Or, a kiss.
Well, yes, especially a kiss. — Mary Oliver

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones. — Mary Oliver

And that is just the point ... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment? — Mary Oliver

I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all. — Mary Oliver

Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life? — Mary Oliver

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual — Mary Oliver

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all. — Mary Oliver

The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem - the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say - exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself - soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all. — Mary Oliver

I had to go away for a few days so I called the kennel and made an appointment. I guess Bear overheard the conversation. "Love and company," said Bear, "are the adornments that change everything. I know they'll be nice to me, but I'll be sad, sad, sad." And pitifully he wrung his paws. I cancelled the trip. — Mary Oliver

The world has need of dreamers as well as shoemakers. — Mary Oliver

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. — Mary Oliver

Listen, whatever you see and love
that's where you are. — 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

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

A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist. — Mary Oliver

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. — Mary Oliver

Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace? — Mary Oliver

Whatever power of the earth rampages, we turn to it dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love. — Mary Oliver