Quotes from Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena's owl of wisdom and Merlin's companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind.

Extending the Airport Runway The good citizens of the commission cast their votes for more of everything. Very early in the morning I go out to the pale dunes, to look over the empty spaces of the wilderness. For something is there, something is there when nothing is there but itself, that is not there when anything else is. Alas, the good citizens of the commission have never seen it, whatever it is, formless, yet palpable. Very shining, very delicate. Very rare.

I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility

And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.

A Voice from I Don't Know Where

I'd seen their hoofprints in the deep needles and knew they ended the long night under the pines... I was thinking: so this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray. (from poem, Five A.M. in the Pinewoods)

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

Sleep comes its little while. Then I wake in the valley of midnight or three a.m. to the first fragrances of spring which is coming, all by itself, no matter what. My heart says, what you thought you have you do not have. My body says, will this pounding ever stop? My heart says: there, there, be a good student. My body says: let me up and out, I want to fondle those soft white flowers, open in the night.

Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it.

Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn't the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!      What a task          to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours,     and not by the century or the year, but by the hours. One

Does the hummingbird think he himself invented his crimson throat? He is wiser than that, I think.

And probably, if they don't waste time looking for an easier world, they can do it.

On the windless days, when the maples have put forth their deep canopies, and the sky is wearing its new blue immensities, and the wind has dusted itself not an hour ago in some spicy field and hardly touches us as it passes by, what is it we do? We lie down and rest upon the generous earth. Very likely we fall asleep.

Congratulations, if you have changed.

Admiring is easy, but affinity, that does take some time.

All I know is that thank you should appear somewhere. So just in case I can't find the perfect place- Thank you, thank you.

The wasp sits on the porch of her paper castle.

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world's working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

Try to find the right place for yourself. If you can't find it, at least dream of it.

only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?

Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work.