Quotes from Mary Oliver

of work and love, a

Just where does self-awareness begin and end? With the June bug? With the shining, task-ridden ant? With the little cloud of gnats that drifts over the pond?

am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.

Previously there were small shops because it was a small town. Now there are small shops because the tourists want to think they are still in that little town, which has vanished.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds.

Yet little by little I learned to love my life. Though sometimes I had to run hard— especially from melancholy— not to be held back.

the faint-pink roses that have never been improved, but come to bud then open like little soft sighs

To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.

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?

Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he could sing, I wish I could sing. ... Each of us wears a shadow. But just now it is summer again and I am watching the lilies bow to each other, then slide on the wind and the tug of desire, close, close to one another. Soon now, I'll turn and start for home. And who knows, maybe Ill be singing.

Off they go, hundreds of them, like the black fingerprints of the rain.

I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning.

The television has two instruments that control it. I get confused. The washer asks me, do you want regular or delicate? Honestly, I just want clean. Everything is like that. I won't even mention cell phones. I can turn on the light of the lamp beside my chair Where a book is waiting, but that's about it. Oh yes, and I can strike a match and make fire.

Certainly imagery can be gleaned from the industrial world — what do Blake's dark Satanic Mills, for example, owe to the natural world? The city can be, and has been, the source of firm poetic description, and imagery too. But the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity.

What we love, shapely and pure, is not to be held, but to be believed in.

I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!

As music is present yet you can't touch it.

Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason.

Every summer I gather a few stones from the beach and keep them in a glass bowl. Now and again I cover them with water, and they drink. There's no question about this; I put tinfoil over the bowl, tightly, yet the water disappears. This doesn't mean we ever have a conversation, or that they have the kind of feelings we do, yet it might mean something. Whatever the stones are, they don't lie in the water and do nothing.