Welcome to our collection of quotes by Mary Oliver. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Mary Oliver
Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterised by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness.
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision a faith, to use an old fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.
You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know.
Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.
I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
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.
I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.
Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
There was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world.
And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful -- how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.
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 night the dark buds of dreams open richly. In the center of every petal is a letter, and you imagine if you could only remember and string them all together they would spell the answer.
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.
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.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say Look! and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from Mysteries, Yes).
I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.
Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps?
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
And now I understand something so frightening andamp;wonderful- how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.
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.
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.
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.
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.
What kind of life is it always to plan
and do, to promise and finish, to wish
for the near and the safe? Yes, by the
heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want
a boat I couldn't steer.
Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day -- which is what I did.
Who knows what will happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.
Belief isn't always easy.
But this much I have learned -- -
if not enough else -- -
to live with my eyes open.
A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry.
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.
Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
And anyway it's just the same old story --
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
If you live simply and with a lyrical heart
in the cumbered neighborhoods or even,
as Mozart sometimes managed to, in a palace,
offering tune after tune after tune,
making some hard-hearted prince
prudent and kind, just by being happy.
There's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
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.
Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields-- and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.
Praying
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
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.
Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.
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.
Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing--the reason they can fly.
I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
No poet ever wrote a poem to dishonor life, to compromise high ideals, to scorn religious views, to demean hope or gratitude, to argue against tenderness, to place rancor before love, or to praise littleness of soul. Not one. Not ever.
I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
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.
Things take the time they take. don't worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
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?
It does no good to bark at the television,
I said. I've tried it too. So he stopped.
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.
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
All my life
I have been restless --
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss --
than wholeness --
than staying at home.
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.
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.
Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.
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.
I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.
But how did you come burning down like a wild needle, knowing just where my heart was?
Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.
The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
