Quotes from Mary Oliver

Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man's most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.

A poem requires a design--a sense of orderliness. Part of our pleasure in the poem is that it is a well-made thing. . . .

whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

All night the dark buds of dreams open richly. In the center of every petal is a letter, and you imagine if you could only remember and string them all together they would spell the answer.

I am so vast, uncertain and strange

Don't bother me. I've just been born.

But faith is still there, and silent. Then he who owns the incomparable voice suddenly flows upward and out of the room and I follow, obedient and happy. Of course I am thinking the Lord was once young and will never in fact be old. And who else could this be, who goes off down the green path, carrying his sandals, and singing?

If it is...not just one's own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world--that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise--then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Did I actually reach out my arms toward it, toward paradise falling, like the fading of the dearest, wildest hope- the dark heart of the story that is all the reason for its telling?

I don't want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things.

Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Among the things I learned in those years were two of special interest to poets. First, that one can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world's work schedule begins. Also, that one can live simply and honorably on just about enough money to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully.

For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe's narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace) we come to accept life's brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! That is another matter.

One learns by thinking about writing, and by talking about writing-but primarily through writing.

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? Well, there is time left— fields everywhere invite you into them.

I stood like Adam in his lonely garden On that first morning, shaken out of sleep, Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves, Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

From the time of snow-melt, when the creek roared and the mud slid and the seeds cracked, I listened to the earth-talk, the root-wrangle, the arguments of energy, the dreams lying just under the surface, then rising, becoming at the last moment flaring and luminous -- (excerpt from the poem, Wild Trilliums)

What, precisely, will you grieve for? "For the river. For myself, my lost joyfulness. For the children who will not know what a river can be—a friend, acompanion, a hint of heaven.

Inside every mind, there's a hermit's cave full of light.

As a carpenter can make a gibbet as well as an altar, a writer can describe the world as trivial or exquisite, as material or as idea, as senseless or as purposeful. Words are wood.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me.

What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.