Mary Oliver Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Mary Oliver quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges? — Mary Oliver

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

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. — Mary Oliver

How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere? — Mary Oliver

The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe. — Mary Oliver

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

I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation. — Mary Oliver

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

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

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded. — 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. — Mary Oliver

Maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us
— Mary Oliver

I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us ... — Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields ... Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness. — Mary Oliver

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

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write. — Mary Oliver

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

Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. — Mary Oliver

It does no good to bark at the television,
I said. I've tried it too. So he stopped. — Mary Oliver

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

Whatever you know about here it doesn't
tell you — Mary Oliver

When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included. — Mary Oliver

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

Have you ever been so happy in your life? — Mary Oliver

I don't want to end up simply having visited the world. — Mary Oliver

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day. — Mary Oliver

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

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. — Mary Oliver

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things. — Mary Oliver

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

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

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

Listen
are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? — Mary Oliver

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

Apparently, I've been considered a recluse. — Mary Oliver

I'd rather write about polar bears than people. — Mary Oliver

Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules — Mary Oliver

It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day. — Mary Oliver

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

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

I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home. — Mary Oliver

Poems arrive ready to begin.
Poets are only the transportation. — Mary Oliver

I know many lives worth living. — Mary Oliver

Each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth. — Mary Oliver

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. — Mary Oliver

You must never stop being whimsical. — Mary Oliver

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

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 — Mary Oliver

How could there be a day in your whole life that doesn't have its splash of happiness? — 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

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

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

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

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

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

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. — Mary Oliver

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

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going. — Mary Oliver

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

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it. — 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

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

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

To leap into it and hold on, connecting everything, — Mary Oliver

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

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. — Mary Oliver

A Voice from I Don't Know Where — Mary Oliver

Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. — Mary Oliver

Winter walks up and down the town swinging his censer, but no smoke or sweetness comes from it, only the sour, metallic frankness of salt and snow. — Mary Oliver

I took one look and fell, hook and tumble. — Mary Oliver

Because my life without you would be
a place of parched and broken trees ... — Mary Oliver

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

What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven. — Mary Oliver

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

Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private. — Mary Oliver

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

All eternity is in the moment. — Mary Oliver

in this world I am as rich
as I need to be. — Mary Oliver

Poetry is meant to be heard. — Mary Oliver

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

My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing. — Mary Oliver

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

My work is loving the world. — Mary Oliver

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

The stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own — Mary Oliver

Our hands, or minds, our feet hold more intelligence. With this I have no quarrel.
But, what about virtue? — Mary Oliver

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

Finally,
the slick mountains of love break over us. — Mary Oliver

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

In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that. — Mary Oliver

The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. — Mary Oliver

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work. — Mary Oliver

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

Mary Oliver: "...Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" ("The Summer Day", New and Selected Poems, 1992) — Bonnie Zieman

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

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

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