Quotes from Mary Oliver

And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.

Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers — that we are instantly weary of looking

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

life is real, and pain is real, but death is an imposter

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.

All afternoon it rained, then such power came down from the clouds on a yellow thread, as authoritative as God is supposed to be. When it hit the tree, her body opened forever.

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. FOR TOM SHAW S.S.J.E.

The moth and the fisheggs are in their place, The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

Those days I was willing, but frightened. What I mean is, I wanted to live my life but I didn't want to do what I had to do to go on, which was: to go back.

What kind of life is it always to plan and do, to promise and finish, to wish for the near and the safe? Yes, by the heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want a boat I couldn't steer.

What good does it do to lie all day in the sun loving what is easy?

I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while.

I quickly found for myself two such blessings - the natural world, and the world of literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

who would cry out to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married to the vivacity of what will be?

I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memoy. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world.

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world? Because, properly attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion. — Mary Oliver, from "What I Have Learned So Far," New and Selected Poems . (Beacon Press; Reprint, 2001 edition July 1, 1993)

Results for Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually?

I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild and want it back.

I saw what love might have done had we loved in time.

Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader.