Quotes from Mary Oliver

Poetry is meant to be heard.

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

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

The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

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.

It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.

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.

Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?

It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.

Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.

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

The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.

The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

I know many lives worth living.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.