Mary Oliver Quotes

because my life without you would be
a place of parched and broken trees

"I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines...

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

(from poem, "Five A.M. in the Pinewoods")"

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.

"Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me"

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment,
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain — imagine! imagine!
the wild and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

All eternity is in the moment.

If the world were only pain and logic,
who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous,
but only
the light that can shine out of a life.

Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety — best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light — good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled.
Like, telling someone you love them.
Or giving your money away, all of it.

Your heart is beating, isn't it?
You're not in chains, are you?

There is nothing more pathetic than caution
when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.

More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing — the reason they can fly.

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older — a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else — standing up! — that hadn't yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of the dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

sweet cousin.

Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple — or a green field — a place to enter, and in which to feel.

Okay, I said. But remember, you can’t fix
everything in the world for everybody.

“However,” said Ricky, “you can’t do
anything at all unless you begin. Haven’t
I heard you say that once or twice, or
maybe a hundred times?