Quotes from Mary Oliver

The different and the novel are sweet, but regularity and repetition are also teachers.

We did not know she was sick, but she has come to the fence, walking like a woman who is balancing a sword inside of her body.

A few voices, strict and punctilious, like Shelley's, like Thoreau's, cry out: Change! Change! But most don't say that; they simply say: Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too. Teilhard de Chardin was not talking about how to escape anguish, but about how to live with it.

Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.

Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain

Have you stood, staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers where the birds like tossing fires flash through the trees, their bodies exchanging a certain happiness in the sleek, amazing humdrum of nature's design — blood's heaven, spirit's haven, to which you cannot belong?

He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page.

What I mean is, I wanted to live my life but I didn't want to do what I had to do

I was so full of energy. I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped the pain was unbearable. If I stopped and thought, maybe the world can't be saved, the pain was unbearable.

to go on, which was: to go back.

You must not ever stop being whimsical.

and, sometimes, from a lifetime ago and another country such a willing and lilting companion— a song made so obviously for me. At what unknowable cost. And by a stranger.

I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. — Mary Oliver, from "How I Go to the Woods," Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press, 2010)

Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her— her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

Outwardly he was calm, reasonable, patient. All his wildness was in his head - such a good place for it!

When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what's wrong with Maybe?

Surely the sea is the most beautiful fact in our universe, but you won't find a fisherman who will say so; what they say is, See you later.

As though they have been told everything already, and are content.

I tell you that ant is very alive! Look at how he fusses at being stepped on.

I think this is / the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind / a little dying

This is Sammy's story. But I also think there are one or two poems in it somewhere. Maybe it's what life was like in this dear town years ago, and how a lot of us miss it. Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.

The chickens ate all the crickets. The foxes ate all the chickens. This morning a friend hauled his boat to shore and gave me the most wondrous fish. In its silver scales it seemed dressed for a wedding. The gills were pulsing, just above where shoulders would be, if it had had shoulders. The eyes were still looking around, I don't know what they were thinking. The chickens ate all the crickets. The foxes ate all the chickens. I ate the fish.

But listen now to what happened to the actual trees; toward the end of that summer they pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs. It was the wrong season, yes, but they couldn't stop. They looked like telephone poles and didn't care. And after the leaves came blossoms. For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.