Quotes from Mary Oliver

Somewhere in the universe, in the gallery of important things, the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish, sits on its pedestal. Dear, dark dapple of plush! A message, reads the label, from that mysterious conglomerate: Oblivion and Co. The hooked head stares from its blouse of dark, feathery lace. It could be a valentine.

Through the trees there is the sound of the wind, palavering...

No matter what the world claims, its wisdom always growing, so it's said, some things don't alter with time: the first kiss is a good example, and the flighty sweetness of rhyme.

knowing that the hour of fulfillment is buried in years of patience — yet willing to labor like that on the mortal wheel.

Except for the Body Except for the body of someone you love, including all its expressions in privacy and in public, trees, I think, are the most beautiful forms on the earth. Though, admittedly, if this were a contest, the trees would come in an extremely distant second.

Clouds have forms, porous and shape-shifting, bumptious, fleecy.

Not Anyone Who Says Not anyone who says, "I'm going to be careful and smart in matters of love," who says, "I'm going to choose slowly," but only those lovers who didn't choose at all but were, as it were, chosen by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful and possibly even unsuitable— only those know what I'm talking about in this talking about love.

If you can hear the trees in their easy hours of course you can also hear them later, crying out at the sawmill.

For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. "Don't love your life too much," it said, and vanished into the world.

Song being born of quest he knows this: he must turn silent were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly unanswered.

But perhaps you're still sleeping. I could wake you with a touch or a kiss. But so could I shake the petals from the wild rose which blossoms so silently and perfectly, and I do not.

have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.

if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Every morning, so far, I'm alive.

She can't see herself apart from the rest of the world or the world from what she must do every spring. Crawling up the high hill, luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin, she doesn't dream, she knows she is a part of the pond she lives in, the tall trees are her children, the birds that swim above her are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

The words, in the long lines of Leaves of Grass, as near as words can be, are a spiritual and a physical touching.

A gull broods on the shore where a moment ago there were two. Softly my right hand fondles my left hand as though it were you.

the passionate hands of the sun

In his boat he went drinking and dreaming and singing then drowned as he reached for the moon's reflection. Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been as desperate. Not the moon, though.

It is the internal force - this intimate interrupter - whose tracks I would follow. the world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self - and does - is a darker and more curious matter.

Has anyone seen meadowlark? I've been looking for probably forty years now unsuccessfully. He used to live in the field I crossed many a morning heading to the woods, truant again from school. There were no meadowlarks in the school. Which was a good enough reason for me not to want to be there. But now it's more serious. There is no field, neither have the woods survived. So, where is meadowlark? If anyone has seen him, please would you let me know posthaste?

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Your clocks, he says plainly, which are always ticking, do not have to be listened to. The spirit of his every word.

There is the heaven we enter through institutional grace and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing in the lowly puddle.