Quotes from Mary Oliver

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.

I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.

I did not come into this world to be comforted. I came, like red bird, to sing. But I'm not red bird, with his head-mop of flame and the red triangle of his mouth full of tongue and whistles, but a woman whose love has vanished, who thinks now, too much, of roots and the dark places where everything is simply holding on.

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.

Nobody owns the hearts of birds.

Lo, and I have discovered how soft bloom turns to green fruit, which turns to sweet fruit. Lo, and I have discovered all winds blow cold at last, and the leaves, so pretty, so many, vanish in the great, black packet of time

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and then foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

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.

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.

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.

That God had a plan, I do not doubt. But what if His plan was, that we would do better?

Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.

whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things

the dark heart of the story that is all the reason for its telling?

Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.

I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us-- as soft as feathers-- that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement, and let ourselves be carried, as through the translucence of mica, to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow-- that is nothing but light--scalding, aortal light-- in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.

ON THE BEACH On the beach, at dawn: four small stones clearly hugging each other. How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make and who am I ever to imagine I could know such a marvelous business? When the sun broke it poured willingly its light over the stones that did not move, not at all, just as, to its always generous term, it shed its light on me, my own body that loves, equally, to hug another body.

For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.

I don't want to live a small life. Open your eyes ... open your life, open your hands.

A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

Because there is no substitute for vigorous and exact description, I would like to say how your eyes, at twilight, reflect, at the same time, the beauty of the world, and its crimes.