Quotes About Mary Oliver

The other day someone I know posted a quote from the poet Mary Oliver, "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" And I almost began to cry. I kept thinking of how scared I've been, how scared many of us have been during these years of the pandemic. And of course, it's not just the pandemic, so many overwhelming fears. I read that quote and I suddenly longed for breath. For relief. For the end of fear.

The rooted pathways offered here are not meant as a definitive list but as waymarkers and fortification for all of us seeking our unique, bewildering, awkward way through the essential question of how to live on our broken, imperiled, beloved earth. It is the question Thoreau asked. The one that Mary Oliver, who passed just before I wrote these words, has perhaps framed most beautifully: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Of course! the path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it. -from The Swan

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.

How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination.

But very little of it can do more than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve.

Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly while the dead-weight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire where everything, even the great whale, throbs with song.

I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.

Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man's most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.

and the heart, if it is still alive, feels something— a yearning for which we have no name but which we may remember, years later, in the darkness, from "A Fox in the Dark

You don't want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don't want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something has to be holding our bodies in its rich and timeless stables or else we would fly away

Give me that dark moment; I will carry it everywhere like a mouthful of rain. — Mary Oliver, from "Pen and Paper and a Breath of Air: Excerpts," Blue Pastures . (Mariner Books; 1 edition November 10, 1995)

What some might call the restrictions of the daily office they find to be an opportunity to foster the inner life.

Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader.

Or, how sweet just to say of a great, burly man: he's a honey.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Swan, by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.