Quotes from Mary Oliver

Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many branches, each one like a poem? Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain? Most of the world says no, no, it's not possible. I refuse to think to such a conclusion. Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.

Anyway, this was my delicious walk in the rain. What was it actually about? Think about what it is that music is trying to say. It was something like that.

All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.

If you're John Muir you want trees to live among. If you're Emily, a garden will do. Try to find the right place for yourself.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.

A woman standing in the weeds. A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next is coming with its own heave and grace.

Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

There is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted --

And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one–the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself–is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed.

I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

I think there ought to be a little music here: hum, hum.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

The way I'd like to go on living in this world wouldn't hurt anything, I'd just go on walking uphill and downhill, looking around, and so what if half the time I don't know what for —

What some might call the restrictions of the daily office they find to be an opportunity to foster the inner life.

You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions.

The witchery of living is my whole conversation with you, my darlings. All I can tell you is what I know. Look, and look again. This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes. It's more than bones. It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. It's more than the beating of the single heart. It's praising. It's giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life—just imagine that! You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

We are happy, and we are lucky. We are neither political nor inclined to likecompany. Repeat: we are happy, and we are lucky. We make for each other: companionship, intimacy, affection, rhapsody. Whenever I hear of something horrible, I want to cover M.'s ears. Whenever I see something beautiful, and my heart is shouting, it is M. I run to, to tell about it.

Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn't choose them, I don't fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.

In the shapeliness of a life, habit plays its sovereign role.

Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he could sing, I wish I could sing.

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats, so single of purpose and thinking, for a while, he had a lifetime

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