Quotes from Mary Oliver

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it's going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

Now that I'm free to be myself, who am I?

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.

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual

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.

And who do you think you are sauntering along five feet up in the air, the ocean a blue fire around your ankles, the sun on your face on your shoulders its golden mouth whispering (so it seems) you! you! you!

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

Do you think the wren ever dreams of a better house?

I did think, let's go about this slowly. This is important. This should take some really deep thought. We should take small thoughtful steps. But, bless us, we didn't.

I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.

Owl Poem One has to say this for the rounds of life that keep coming and going; it has worked so far. The rabbit, after all, has never asked if the grass wanted to live. Any more than the owl consults with the rabbit. Acceptance of the world requires that I bow even to you, Master of the night.

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.

So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Let God and the world know you are grateful.That the gift has been given.

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life?

Be ignited, or be gone.

A poem should always have birds in it.

That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die.

A Dream of Trees There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees, A quiet house, some green and modest acres A little way from every troubling town, A little way from factories, school, laments. I would have time, I thought, and time to spare, With only streams and birds for company, To build out of my life a few wild stanzas. And then it came to me, that so was death, A little way away from everywhere.

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating—its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

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.

All important ideas must include the trees, the mountains, and the rivers. • To understand many things you must reach out of your own condition.

When I woke the morning light was just slipping in front of the stars and I was covered with blossoms.