Mary Oliver Quotes

to leap into it and hold on, connecting everything,

I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people, they exist, and that they dance.

Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

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.

What I know I could put into a pack
as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,

important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable.

Truly
I try to be good but sometimes
a person just has to break out and
act like the wild and springy thing
one used to be. It’s impossible not
to remember wild and want it back. So
if someday you can’t find me you might
look into that tree or — of course
it’s possible — under it.

Here’s a story, and you don’t have to visit many
houses to find it. One person is talking,
the other one is not really listening.
Someone can look like they are but they’re
actually thinking about something they
want to say, or their minds are just
wandering. Or they’re looking at that
little box people hold in their hands these
days. And people get discouraged, so they
quit trying. And the very quiet people,
you may have noticed, are often the sad
people.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving

EVERY DOG’S STORY

I have a bed, my very own.
It’s just my size.
And sometimes I like to sleep alone
with dreams inside my eyes.

But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy
and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why.
But I’m no longer sleepy
and too slowly the hours go by.

So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon
is shining on your face
and I know it will be morning soon.

Everybody needs a safe place.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light. It was 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. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these - the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?

What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die.

It's true, isn't it,
in our world,
that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns
are a single thing-
that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns
are a single thing-
that even the purest light, lacking the robe of darkness,
would be without expression-
that love itself, without pain, would be
no more than a shrug gable comfort.

Now and again there's a moment,
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.

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.