Quotes from Mary Oliver

Do you think of them as decoration? Think again. Here are maples, flashing. And here are the oaks, holding on all winter to their dry leaves. And here are the pines, that will never fail, until death, the instructions to be green.

Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light.

each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.

that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

we are all one family but love ourselves best.

Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents

quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

But his big, round music, after all, is too breathy to last.

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator./In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting/to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.

To believe in the soul—to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view— imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world!

knowing as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married to the vitality of what will be? I don't say it's easy, but what else will do

I read Jacob Boehme and am caught in his shining web. Here are Desire and Will that should be (he says) as two arms at one task; in my life they are less cooperative. Will keeps sliding away down the hill, to play when work is called for, and Desire piously wants to labor when the best season of merriment is around me. Troublemakers, both of them.

The snails on the pink sleds of their bodies are moving among the morning glories The spider is asleep among the red thumbs of the raspberries.

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

I give them- one, two, three, four- the kiss of courtesy, of sweet thanks, of anger, of good luck in the deep earth. May they sleep well. May they soften. But I will not give them the kiss of complicity. I will not give them the responsability for my life.

Things take the time they take. Don't worry.

I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I'm sorry I wasn't wiser sooner. I'm sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely.

there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted— each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning, whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.

I think this is the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn't have its splash of happiness?

This I have always known - that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come someday to bitter and mortal regret.

Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy. Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?

But all my life—so far— I have loved best how the flowers rise and open, how the pink lungs of their bodies enter the fire of the world and stand there shining and willing—the one thing they can do before they shuffle forward into the floor of darkness, they become the trees.

Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier?

What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?