Quotes from Mary Oliver

How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination.

Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too.

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers

For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream for me.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. _______ And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? Have I endured loneliness with grace?

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?

But very little of it can do more than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve.

Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough.

What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die.

Our hands, or minds, our feet hold more intelligence. With this I have no quarrel. But, what about virtue?

My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.

Above the modest house and the palace—the same darkness. Above the evil man and the just, the same stars. Above the child who will recover and the child who will not recover, the same energies roll forward, from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next. I bow down.

The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. Poem: The Ponds

I try to remember when time's measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay - how everything lives, shifting from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures.

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?

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing— that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Let the world have its way with you, luminous as it is with mystery and pain— graced as it is with the ordinary.

This is a poem about death, about the heart blanching in its fold of shadows because it knows someday it will be the fish and the wave and no longer itself— it will be those white wings, flying in and out of the darkness but not knowing it— this is a poem about loving the world and everything in it: the self, the perpetual muscle, the passage in and out, the bristling swing of the sea.

In the morning it shuffles, unhurried, across the wet fields in its black slippers, in its coal-colored coat with the white stripe like a river running down its spine

Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.

The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.