Quotes from Mary Oliver

As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important. ... Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing - the reason they can fly.

even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness, like praise, from the pool of shade you have found beside the everlasting.

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think, than the lilies of Monet. And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead children out of the fields into the text of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?

Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world.

Maker of All Things, including appetite, including stealth, including the fear that makes all of us, sometime or other, flee for the sake of our small and precious lives, let me abide in your shadow— let me hold on to the edge of your robe as you determine what you must let be lost and what will be saved.

the river can't wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it's been there before.

FOR TOM SHAW S.S.J.E. (1945–2014) Where has this cold come from? "It comes from the death of your friend." Will I always, from now on, be this cold? "No, it will diminish. But always it will be with you." What is the reason for it? "Wasn't your friendship always as beautiful as a flame?

No poet ever wrote a poem to dishonor life, to compromise high ideals, to scorn religious views, to demean hope or gratitude, to argue against tenderness, to place rancor before love, or to praise littleness of soul. Not one. Not ever.

When death is about to happen does the body grow heavier, or lighter?

and the heart, if it is still alive, feels something— a yearning for which we have no name but which we may remember, years later, in the darkness, from "A Fox in the Dark

So it is if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams all the way to the grave.

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

Especially when writers are just starting out, the emphasis should be not only upon what they write, but equally upon the process of writing. A successful class is a class where no one feels that 'writer's block' is a high-priority subject.

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether.

A poem on the page speaks to the listening mind.

There are two sofas, and upon one, says Poe, the proprietor lies asleep. But it is sleep as Poe most sought and valued it-not for the sake of rest, but for escape. Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world.

For poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Mary Oliver (1935-2019). This quote from 'A Poetry Handbook' (1994)

What does it mean... that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it?

How God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely. It's wonderful to walk along like that, thought not the usual intention to reach an answer but merely drifting.

Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don't keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect. _______

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

Sometimes there are no rules.