Quotes from Mary Oliver

What is your heart doing now? Remembering. Remembering!

I believe everything has a soul.

Dear Bear, it's no use, the world is like that. So stay where you are, and live long. Someday maybe we'll wise up and remember what you were: hopeless ambassador of a world that returns now only in poets' dreams.

The Instant Today one small snake lay, looped and solitary in the high grass, it swirled to look, didn't like what it saw and was gone in two pulses forward and with no sound at all, only two taps, in disarray, from that other shy one, my heart.

Okay, I said. But remember, you can't fix everything in the world for everybody. "However," said Ricky, "you can't do anything at all unless you begin.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps?

Of course! the path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly while the dead-weight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire where everything, even the great whale, throbs with song.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go

PERCY (NINE) Your friend is coming I say to Percy, and name a name and he runs to the door, his wide mouth in its laugh-shape, and waves, since he has one, his tail. Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. How would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.

The question is, what will it be like after the last day? Will I float into the sky or will I fray within the earth or a river— remembering nothing? How desperate I would be if I couldn't remember the sun rising, if I couldn't remember trees, rivers; if I couldn't even remember, beloved, your beloved name.

I know several lives worth living.

What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon.

It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one's time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.

Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields— and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.

I have been thinking about living like the lilies that blow in the fields. They rise and fall in the wedge of the wind, and have no shelter from the tongues of the cattle, and have no closets or cupboards, and have no legs. Still I would like to be as wonderful as that old idea. But if I were a lily I think I would wait all day for the green face of the hummingbird to touch me. What I mean is, could I forget myself even in those feathery fields?

there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save.

think of this every day. I think of it when I meet the turtle with its patient green face, or hear the hawk's tin-tongued skittering cry, or watch the otters at play in the pond. I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping.

I wanted to live my life but I didn't want to do what I had to do to go on

This is not just surprise and pleasure. This is not just beauty sometimes too hot to touch. This is not a blessing with a beginning and an end. This is not just a wild summer. This is not conditional.

Late, late, but now lovely and lovelier. And the two of us, together—a part of it.

Percy (One) Our new dog, named for the beloved poet, ate a book which unfortunately we had    left unguarded. Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita, of which many copies are available. Every day now, as Percy grows into the beauty of his life, we touch his wild, curly head and say, "Oh, wisest of little dogs.