Quotes from Mary Oliver

I suppose they, those lives soaked in evil, are miserable and so they ever despise happiness. I suppose they feel powerless and therefore must exert power wherever they can, which is so often upon those unable to comprehend what is happening, much less defend themselves.

I WAKE CLOSE TO MORNING Why do people keep asking to see God's identity papers when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough? Certainly any god might turn away in disgust. Think of Sheba approaching the kingdom of Solomon. Do you think she had to ask, "Is this the place?

No, I'd never been to this country before. No, I didn't know where the roads would lead me. No, I didn't intend to turn back.

I know a lot of fancy words. I tear them from my heart and my tongue. Then I pray.

Let them imitate and imitate - and learn and learn. ...who has not seen a young painter in a museum intently copying a Vermeer or a van Gogh, and believing himself on the way to learning something valuable? Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one's work - are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as the inspired, get there.

Sometimes there's only a hint, a possibility. What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason. I hope everyone knows that.

I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.

standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame.

What we must do, I suppose, is to hope the world keeps its balance; what we are to do, however, with our hearts waiting and watching-truly I do not know.

Such richness flowing through the branches of summer and into the body, carried inward on the five rivers! Disorder and astonishment rattle your thoughts and your heart cries for rest but don't succumb, there's nothing so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy is a taste before it's anything else, and the body can lounge for hours devouring the important moments. Listen, the only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it into the body first, like small wild plums.

One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning --- some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain. 6 But to lift the hoof! For that you need an idea. 7 For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. Don't love your life too much, it said, and vanished into the world.

Last night the geese came back, slating fast from the blossom of the rising moon down to the black pond. A muskrat swimming in the twilight saw them and hurried to the secret lodges to tell everyone spring had come. And so it had. By morning when I went out the last of the ice had disappeared, blackbirds sang on the shores. Every year the geese, returning, do this, I don't know how.

The point is, you're you, and that's for keeps.

If this was lost, let us all be lost always.

I forgive them their unhappiness, I forgive them for walking out of the world. But I don't forgive them for turning their faces away, for taking off their veils and dancing for death — for hurtling toward oblivion on the sharp blades of their exquisite poems, saying: this is the way.

The World I Live In I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what's wrong with Maybe? You wouldn't believe what once or twice I have seen. I'll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.

And maybe there will be, after all, some slack and perfectly balanced blind and rough peace, finally, in the deep and green and utterly motionless pools after all that falling?

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever

What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?

I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.

In the darkness they wondered if they could do it, and knew they had to try to do it.