Quotes from Mary Oliver

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

When I wake, and you are already wiping the stars away

So quickly, without a moment's warning, does the miraculous swerve and point to us, demanding that we be its willing servant.

Every day I'm still looking for God and I'm still finding him everywhere, in the dust, in the flowerbeds. Certainly in the oceans, in the islands that lay in the distance continents of ice, countries of sand each with its own set of creatures and God, by whatever name. How perfect to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket. But it's late, for all of us, and in truth the only ship there is is the ship we are all on burning the world as we go.

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.

And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

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.

It's impossible not to remember wild and want it back.

Beauty can both shout and whisper, and still it explains nothing.

For hours I wandered over the fields and the only thing that kept me company was a song, it glided along with my delicious dark happiness, my heavy, bristling and aching delight at the world which has been like this forever and forever— the leaves, the birds, the ponds, the loneliness

to know our world is to be busy all day long with happiness.

determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape

and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death?

I saw what a child must love, I saw what love might have done had we loved in time.

To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always care-ingly.

I'm older than I used to be, and therefore I understand things nobody would think of who's young and a hurry.

For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate this rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.

In the beginning, I was so young and such a stranger to myself, I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it, hear it, and react to it before I knew it all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

But living like this is for me the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life. So be it! With my whole heart, I live as I live. My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, the suggestive—not to the factual or the useful. I walk, and I notice. I am sensual in order to be spiritual.

let me be as urgent as a knife

Whitman was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man's inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast terrible shadows, that each of the so-called senseless acts has its thread looping back through the world and into a human heart.

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.