Mary Oliver Quotes

The world has need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.

This is, I think, what holiness is:

the natural world, where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.

Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave full of light,
full of snow, full of concentration.

I’ve knelt there, and so have you,
hanging on to what you love,

to what is lovely.

Mary Oliver, At the Lake

"Not anyone who says "I'm going to be
careful and smart in the matters of love,"
who says, "I'm going to choose slowly,"
but only those lovers who didn't choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible
and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable — only those know what I'm talking about
in this talking about love."

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world's working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it.

…whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty.

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Little Crazy Love Song”

I don’t want eventual,
I want soon.
It’s 5 a.m. It’s noon.
It’s dusk falling to dark.
I listen to music.
I eat up a few wild poems
while time creeps along
as though it’s got all day.
This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.

Poems arrive ready to begin.
Poets are only the transportation.

Let the path become where I choose to walk, and not

otherwise established.

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree. To do this I have to climb branch by branch and write down the numbers in a little book. So I suppose, from their point of view, it’s reasonable that my friends say: what foolishness! She’s got her head in the clouds again. But it’s not. Of course I have to give up, but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder of it — the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

As for life,
I'm humbled,
I'm without words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen –
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort –
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about

stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,

and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can't wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?

I had a dog
who loved flowers.
Briskly she went
through the fields,

yet paused
for the honeysuckle
or the rose,
her dark head

and her wet nose
touching
the face
of every one

with its petals
of silk
with its fragrance
rising

into the air
where the bees,
their bodies
heavy with pollen

hovered -
and easily
she adored
every blossom

not in the serious
careful way
that we choose
this blossom or that blossom

the way we praise or don't praise -
the way we love
or don't love -
but the way

we long to be -
that happy
in the heaven of earth -
that wild, that loving.

Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

It does no good to bark at the television,
I said. I’ve tried it too. So he stopped.

And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness — of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.