Mary Oliver Quotes

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

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. ~ Mary Oliver

If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.
I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question. ~ 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

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think - no, you will realize - that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying. ~ 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

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

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. ~ Mary Oliver

Of course I am thinking the Lord was once young and will never in fact be old.
And who else could this be, who goes off down the green path,
Carrying his sandals, and singing? ~ 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

DAISIES

It is possible, I suppose that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what it means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display
the small suns of their center piece, their -- if you don't
mind my saying so -- their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;
for example -- I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch --
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field. ~ Mary Oliver

Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be
musical inside yourself. ~ Mary Oliver

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

As long as you're dancing, you can
Break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
Extending the rules.
Sometimes there are no rules. ~ Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world. ~ Mary Oliver

When it over, I want to say:all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's 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.
from When the death comes ~ Mary Oliver

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

On the windless days, when the maples have put forth their deep canopies, and the sky is wearing its new blue immensities, and the wind has dusted itself not an hour ago in some spicy field and hardly touches us as it passes by, what is it we do? We lie down and rest upon the generous earth. Very likely we fall asleep. ~ 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

Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed. ~ Mary Oliver

Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it. ~ Mary Oliver

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -
books, bricks, grief -
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down."
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply? ~ Mary Oliver

Yes, it's all different," he said.
"You're going to be very surprised."
But I wasn't thinking of that. I only
wanted to hold him. "Listen," he said,
"I miss that too.
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."
And then, as he used to, he said, "Let's go!"
And we walked down the beach together. ~ 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

Think of this every day. I think of it when I meet the turtle with its patient green face, or hear the hawk's tin-tongued skittering cry, or watch the otters at play in the pond. I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping. ~ 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

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

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer. ~ Mary Oliver

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 ~ Mary Oliver

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

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others. ~ 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

I'd rather write about polar bears than people. ~ 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

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. ~ Mary Oliver

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

...from Emerson's journals. In the context, it is written in the past tense; changing the verb to present tense it reads: The poem is a confession of faith. Which is to say, the poem is not an exercise. It is not 'wordplay.' Whatever skill or beauty it has, in contains something beyond language devices, and has a purpose other than itself. ~ 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

Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language. ~ Mary Oliver

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? ~ Mary Oliver

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings. ~ Mary Oliver

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted -

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray. ~ Mary Oliver

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl. ~ Mary Oliver

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

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

Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier? ~ Mary Oliver

Walker-thinkers have found various ways to accommodate the gifts that their walking brings. Caught paperless on his walks in the Czech enclaves of Iowa, maestro Dvořák scribbles the string quartets that visited his brain on his starched white shirt cuffs (so the legend goes). More proactively, Thomas Hobbes fashioned a walking stick for himself with an inkwell attached, and modern poet Mary Oliver leaves pencils in the trees along her usual pathways, in case a poem descends during her rambles. ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

The Snow Cricket

Just beyond the leaves and the white faces
Of the lilies,
I saw the wings
Of the green snow cricket
As it went flying
From vine to vine,
Searching, then finding a shadowed place in which
To sing and sing…
One repeated
Rippling phrase
Built of loneliness
And its consequences: longing
And hope…
It was trembling
With the force of its crying out,
And in truth I couldn't wait to see if another would come to it
For fear that it wouldn't,
And I wouldn't be able to bear it
I wished it good luck, with all my heart,
And went back over the lawn, to where the lilies were standing
On their calm, cob feet,
Each in the ease
Of a single, waxy body
Breathing contentedly in the chill night air;
And I swear I pitied them, as I looked down
into the theater of their perfect faces-
That frozen, bottomless glare. ~ 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

I walk in the world to love it. ~ 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

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

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

The Pond"

August of another summer, and once again
I am drinking the sun
and the lilies again are spread across the water.
I know now what they want is to touch each other.
I have not been here for many years
during which time I kept living my life.
Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he
could sing,
I wish I could sing.
A little thanks from every throat would be appropriate.
This is how it has been, and this is how it is:
All my life I have been able to feel happiness,
except whatever was not happiness,
which I also remember.
Each of us wears a shadow.
But just now it is summer again
and I am watching the lilies bow to each other,
then slide on the wind and the tug of desire,
close, close to one another,
Soon now, I'll turn and start for home.
And who knows, maybe I'll be singing. ~ Mary Oliver

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

So every day So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you. ~ Mary Oliver

All I know
is that "thank you" should appear somewhere.

So just in case
I can't find
the perfect place-
"Thank you, thank you. ~ Mary Oliver

It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape - between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. We need the field from which the lark rises - bird that is more than itself, that is the voice of the universe: vigorous, godly job. Without the physical world such hope it: hacked off. Is: dried up. Without wilderness no fish could leap and flash, no deer could bound soft as eternal waters over the field; no bird could open its wings and become buoyant, adventurous, valorous beyond even the plan of nature. Nor could we. ~ 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

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

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

The Sunflowers

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks, their dry spines

creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky

sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy

but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young--
the important weather,

the wandering crows.
Don't be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,

which follows the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds--
each one a new life!--

hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,

is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning. ~ Mary Oliver

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing. ~ Mary Oliver

and, sometimes,
from a lifetime ago
and another country
such a willing and lilting companion -

a song
made so obviously for me.
At what unknowable cost.
And by a stranger. ~ Mary Oliver

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

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

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

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. ~ Mary Oliver

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

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. ~ 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

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

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

what I wanted
was to be willing
to be afraid ~ Mary Oliver

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.
Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime.
Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part
of ourselves without which no poem can live? ~ Mary Oliver

Whatever you know about here it doesn't
tell you ~ 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

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies - in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicate
a preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world - among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees. ~ Mary Oliver

For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists. ~ Mary Oliver

Honey Locust"

Who can tell how lovely in June is the
honey locust tree, or why
a tree should be so sweet and live
in this world? Each white blossom
on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed -
a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flower
holds a flask
of fragrance called Heaven, which is never sealed.
The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy
with gratitude. They are working like farmers. They are as
happy as saints. After awhile the flowers begin to
wilt and drop down into the grass. Welcome
shines in the grass.

Every year I gather
handfuls of blossoms and eat of their mealiness; the honey
melts in my mouth, the seeds make me strong,
both when they are crisps and ripe, and even at the end
when their petals have turned dully yellow.

So it is
if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is
not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams
all the way to the grave. ~ Mary Oliver

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

And now I understand something so frightening &wonderful-
how the mind clings to the road it knows,
rushing through crossroads, sticking
like lint to the familiar. ~ Mary Oliver

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

And the speck of my heart, in my shed of flesh and bone, began to sing out, the way the sun would sing if the sun could sing, if light had a mouth and a tongue, if the sky had a throat, if god wasn't just an idea but shoulders and a spine, gathered from everywhere, even the most distant planets, blazing up. Where am I? Even the rough words come to me now, quick as thistles. Who made your tyrant's body, your thirst, your delving, your gladness? Oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire! Get away from me. Come closer. ~ Mary Oliver

I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility ~ Mary Oliver

Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude. ~ Mary Oliver

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude. ~ 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

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

Sunrise
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire. ~ Mary Oliver

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs? ~ Mary Oliver

In a universe devoid of life, any life at all would be immensely meaningful. We ARE that meaning. "And what we see, "says the poet Mary Oliver, "is the world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish." As though life itself is the great, universal, unrequited love of all time. But there is even more to this. Deep mystery. We are the universe aware of itself. We let the miracle get lost in distractions. On a planet so rich with living companions, much of humanity sentences itself to solitary confinement. Late at night, I used to lie in my boat listening to radio calls from ships to families ashore. There was only one conversation, and it boils down to, "I love you and I miss you: come home safe." Connections make us individuals. Ironic, isn't it? The more connected, the more unique our life becomes ... ~ Carl Safina

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second. ~ Mary Oliver

To write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. ~ 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

If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves. If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt. But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation. I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster. And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with some small and easy story. ~ Mary Oliver