Mary Oliver Quotes

to be absent from the world
and alive, again, in another...

"It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning — it'll be gone."

[Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver (O Magazine, March 2011)]

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased... what would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

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

otherwise established.

Winter walks up and down the town swinging his censer, but no smoke or sweetness comes from it, only the sour, metallic frankness of salt and snow.

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl.

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive — that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

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.

There are as many worlds as there are imaginers.
- The Boat (in “Winter Hours”)

The salamanders,
like tiny birds, locked into formation,
fly down into the endless mysteries

of the transforming water,
and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be — that anything is ever final — that anything, in spite of its absence,
ever dies
a perfect death?

(from the poem 'What Is It?')

What good does it do
to lie all day in the sun
loving what's easy?
It never grew easy,
but at least I grew peaceful:

He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a face; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.

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

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,

I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her — her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.