Quotes from Mary Oliver

Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)

Little Crazy Love Song" I don't want eventual, I want soon. It's 5 a.m. It's noon. It's dusk falling to dark. I listen to music. I eat up a few wild poems while time creeps along as though it's got all day. This is what I have. The dull hangover of waiting, the blush of my heart on the damp grass, the flower-faced moon. A gull broods on the shore where a moment ago there were two. Softly my right hand fondles my left hand as though it were you.

This is, I think, what holiness is: the natural world, where every moment is full of the passion to keep moving. Inside every mind there's a hermit's cave full of light, full of snow, full of concentration. I've knelt there, and so have you, hanging on to what you love, to what is lovely. Mary Oliver, At the Lake

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?

All eternity is in the moment.

I don't want you just to sit down at the table. I don't want you just to eat, and be content. I want you to walk out into the fields where the water is shining, and the rice has risen. I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth. I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a blessing.

What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.

The world has need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.

The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.

I believed in the world. Oh, I wanted to be easy in the peopled kingdoms, to take my place there, but there was none that I could find shaped like me.

All morning it has been raining. In the language of the garden, this is happiness.

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done?

I don't want to lose a single thread from the intricate brocade of this happiness .I want to remember everything.

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

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star both intimate and ultimate, and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful. And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper: oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two beautiful bodies of your lungs.

And this is what I learned: that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

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.

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.

Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

Love, love, love, says Percy. And run 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.

Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation.

I walk in the world to love it.

How wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints - all that glorious, temporary stuff.