Mary Oliver quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mary Oliver on Wise Famous Quotes.

Be ignited, or be gone.

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

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.

Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.

And I say to my heart: rave on.

My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.

How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?

The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.

The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe.

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

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

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

A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.

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

And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real

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

No, I'd never been to this country
before. No, I didn't know where the roads
would lead me. No, I didn't intend to
turn back.

All my life
I have been restless-
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss-
than wholeness-
than staying at home.

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

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

Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.

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

I think there ought to be
a little music here:
hum, hum.

I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

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

Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing towards you.

Where you crawl and crawl,
where you live in the husks of trees,
where you lie on the wild twigs

The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change.

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It

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

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

Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.

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

What good does it do
to lie all day in the sun
loving what's easy?
It never grew easy,
but at least I grew peaceful:

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?

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

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same

Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?

Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.

... Clear pebbles of the rain ...

That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

life is real,
and pain is real,
but death is an imposter,

Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.

When a man says he hears angels singing,
he hears angels singing.

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

The rain is slow.

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

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

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

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

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Whatever you know about here it doesn't
tell you

I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.

Does the hummingbird think he himself invented his crimson throat?
He is wiser than that, I think.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

in this world I am as rich
as I need to be.

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

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

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.

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

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.

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

What will you do with your one precious, wild life?

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

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

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

But his big, round music, after all, is too breathy to last.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.

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

And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, that is better than these light-filled bodies?

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

I got saved by poetry and I got saved by the beauty of the world.

Knowing as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be? I don't say it's easy, but what else will do

All eternity is in the moment.

Now and again there's a moment,
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.

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

we are all one family but love ourselves best.

In the darkness they wondered if they
could do it, and knew they had to try
to do it.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

The water, that circle of shattered glass,
healed itself with a slow whisper
and lay back

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.

The natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers?

Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.

I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.

You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

All things are inventions of holiness. Some more rascally than others. I

The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn something by being nothing

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