Quotes from Mary Oliver

I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly. Flowers are sweet. They have short, beatific lives. They offer much pleasure. There is nothing in this world that can be said against them. Sad, isn't, that all they can kiss is the air. Yes, yes! We are the lucky ones.

I, too, have been forced to stand close to it, and have felt the almost muscular agony of impotence before it, unable to interfere or assuage or do anything effective. Though I do—oh yes I do—believe the soul is improvable. Oh sweet and defiant hope! 5

I did not come into this world to be comforted. I came, like a red bird, to sing. But I'm not a red bird, with his head mop of flame and the red triangle of his mouth full of tongue and whistles, but a woman whose love has vanished, who thinks now, too much, of roots and the dark places where everything is simply holding on.

All important ideas must include the trees,the mountains, and the rivers.

Every year the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches, in the silver baskets, and love the world. Is it necessary to say any more? Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields? Have you ever been so happy in your life?

What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason. I hope everyone knows that.

I'm older than I used to be, and therefore I understand things nobody would think of who's young and in a hurry.

At first they were just clouds like any other. Then they swelled and swirled; then they hung very still; then they broke open. This is, I suppose, just one of the common miracles, a transformation, not a vision, not an answer, not a proof, but I put it there, close against my heart, where the need is, and it serves the purpose

There was someone I loved who grew old and ill. One by one I watched the fires go out. There was nothing I could do except to remember that we receive then we give back.

Memory: a golden bowl, or a basement without light. For which reason the nightmare comes with its painful story and says: you need to know this. Some memories I would give anything to forget. Others I would not give up upon the point of death, they are the bright hawks of my life.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,     to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly; for example—I think this     as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch— the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the     daisies for the field.

how wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints—

Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends;

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

Have you noticed? Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts lay down on the earth and died it's hard to tell now what's bone, and what merely was once.

This is the lesson of age—events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different.

there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget.

The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information, where he offers graciously his deep findings. While the man who has only questions to comfort himself makes music.

Let me always be who I am, and then some.

turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city- turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.

The cricket doesn't wonder if there's a heaven or, if there is, if there's room for him. It's fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings. If he can, he enters a house through the tiniest crack under the door. Then the house grows colder. He sings slower and slower. Then, nothing. This must mean something, I don't know what. But certainly it doesn't mean he hasn't been an excellent cricket all his life.

Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned— if not enough else— to live with my eyes open.

how the cold makes us dream!