Quotes from Mary Oliver

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

Listen, once again, as again, and again, we are given this single wisdom: to know our world is to be busy all day long with happiness.

Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress.

Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy. Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere? Listen to me or not, it hardly matters. I'm not trying to be wise, that would be foolish. I'm just chattering.

If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing continuously. I'm not, though I pause wherever I feel this holiness, which is why I'm often so late coming back from wherever I went.

Neither is it possible to control, or regulate, the machinery of creativity.

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel.

Finally I was advertised on the hotline of help, and yet there I was, slopping along happily in the stream's coolness. So maybe it was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us all be lost always.

I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.

A normal life includes the occasional black mood

believe us, they say, it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world. I beg of you, do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance. It could mean something. It could mean everything.

Why do people keep asking to see God's identity papers when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough?

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 caringly.

Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them.

And they went on. "Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness.

When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive.

Existe la vida y existe la ópera, y yo quiero las dos cosas.

Things take the time they take.

Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.

At one I paused to drink, and inside me the water whispered: And now, like us, you are a million years old.

but he was unreachable. As music is present yet you can't touch it...

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.

The one thing he is adamant about is that we should look - we must look - for that is the liquor of life, that brooding upon issues, that attention to thought even as we weed the garden or milk the cow.