Quotes from Mary Oliver

What you have never noticed about the toad, probably ... his front feet, which are sometimes padded, hold three nimble digits - had anyone a piano small enough I think the toad could learn to play something, a little Mozart maybe

What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers?

Whatever can't be taught, there is a great deal that can, and must, be learned.

I was recently given a power drill, which also sets and removes screws. It could be a small cannon, so apprehensive am I of its fierce and quick power. When I handle it well (which to begin with means that I aim it correctly), difficult tasks are made easy. But when I do not, I hold an angry weasel in my hand.

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 don't think I am old yet, or done with growing. But my perspective has altered—I am less hungry for the busyness of the body, more interested in the tricks of the mind.

When I was young, I was attracted to sorrow. It seemed interesting. It seemed an energy that would take me somewhere. Now I am older . . . and I hate sorrow. I see that it has no energy of its own, but uses mine, furtively. I see that it is leaden, without breath, and repetitious, and unsolvable. And now I see that I am sorrowful about only a few things, but over and over.

Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?

Your heart is beating, isn't it? You're not in chains, are you? There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own

What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

About the River Clarion Along its shores were, may I say, very intense cardinal flowers. And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them, for heaven's sakes– the lucky ones: they have such deep natures, they are so happily obedient. While I sit here in a house filled with books, ideas, doubts, hesitations.

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.

who knows what it dreamed of in the first springs of its life, escaping the cottontail's teeth and everything dangerous else. Who knows when supreme patience took hold, and the wind's wandering among its leaves was enough of motion, of travel.

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.

Or, how sweet just to say of a great, burly man: he's a honey.

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself. Who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work - who is thus responsible to the work.

As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important.

But if they were only shadow-companions, still they were constant, and powerful, and amazing.

My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at the three o'clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done ... The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

let the soft animal of your body love what it loves

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

When one writes the last apple on the tree, or the one small peach as pink as dawn, one is beginning to deal with particulars - to develop texture... Such texture is vital to all poetry. It is what makes the poem an experience, something much more than mere statement.

It wasn't about the bird, it was something about the way stone stays mute and put, whatever goes flashing by.