Quotes from Mary Oliver

what I wanted was to be willing to be afraid

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. How would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

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.

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?

I woke And crept Like a cat On silent feet About my own house- To look At you While you were sleeping, Your hair Sprayed on the pillow, Your eyes Closed, Your body Safe and solitary, And my doors Shut for your safety And your comfort. I did this Thinking I was intruding Yet wanting to see The most beautiful thing That has ever been in my house.

The salamanders, like tiny birds, locked into formation, fly down into the endless mysteries of the transforming water, and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death? (from the poem 'What Is It?' )

There is only one question; how to love this world.

Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.

More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

Then I remember: death comes before the rolling away of the stone.

Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vain-glory is the bane of us, the humans.

And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness—of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.

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.

Doesn't anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the middle of the night and sing?

Starlings in Winter I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening. I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved. Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them. If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind.

There are as many worlds as there are imaginers. - The Boat (in "Winter Hours")

How do I love you? Oh, this way and that way. Oh, happily. Perhaps I may elaborate by demonstration? Like this, and like this and no more words now

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be gone. [ Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver ( O Magazine , March 2011)]

to be absent from the world and alive, again, in another...

Truly 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 and want it back. So if someday you can't find me you might look into that tree or—of course it's possible—under it.

And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, that is better than these light-filled bodies?

Let the path become where I choose to walk, and not otherwise established.

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.