Quotes from Mary Oliver

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

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.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

The Uses Of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.

You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

I Go Down To The Shore I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.

Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness.

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

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

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.