Quotes from Mary Oliver

Today Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.

Now and again there's a moment, when the heart cries aloud: yes, I am willing to be that wild darkness, that long, blue body of light.

to leap into it and hold on, connecting everything

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

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? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a face; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased... what would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

in this world I am as rich as I need to be.

It does no good to bark at the television, I said. I've tried it too. So he stopped.

The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.

The Gift Be still, my soul, and steadfast. Earth and heaven both are still watching though time is draining from the clock and your walk, that was confident and quick, has become slow. 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.

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

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.

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

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another — why don't you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?

And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.

Why should I have been surprised? Hunters walk the forest without a sound. The hunter, strapped to his rifle, the fox on his feet of silk, the serpent on his empire of muscles— all move in a stillness, hungry, careful, intent. Just as the cancer entered the forest of my body, without a sound.

There was only myself and the world, and it was I who was leaving.

All my life I have been restless- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss- than wholeness- than staying at home.

What good does it do to lie all day in the sun loving what's easy? It never grew easy, but at least I grew peaceful:

The water, that circle of shattered glass, healed itself with a slow whisper and lay back