Quotes from Mary Oliver

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.

If you think you see a face in the clouds, why not send a greeting? It can't do any harm.

they won't be false and they won't be true, but hey'll be real.

If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more. And anyway 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.

everything. I felt like the little donkey when his burden is finally lifted. Things! 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.

The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place, The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

And there was the passion which he invested in the poems. The metaphysical curiosity! The oracular tenderness with which he viewed the world - its roughness, its differences, the stars, the spider - nothing was outside the range of his interest.

How often now I just sit, with my elbows on the desk and my hands holding my face bold and upright, and stare into the past.

Here is an amazement -- once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family, and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

Also I wanted to be able to love. And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly

My heart dresses in black and dances.

And I walk on, over the shoulder of summer and down across the red-dappled fall

I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field.

It is what I was born for— to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world— to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant— but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab, the daily presentations.

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?

And this is what I learned: that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace, easygoing here, ferociously unmovable there; they were thoughtful.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.

Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did.