Mary Oliver Quotes
-
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
-
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
-
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
-
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
-
I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
-
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
-
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
-
I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. 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.
-
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
-
But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.
-
There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.
-
Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function - to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory to the world, that good teacher.
-
I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.
-
Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn't amuse me. Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.
-
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
-
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
-
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
-
I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
-
To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
-
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
-
What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.
-
I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
-
I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
-
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.