Mary Oliver Quotes

I am so happy to be alive in this world
I would like to live forever, but I am
content not to. Seeing what I have seen
has filled me; believing what I believe
has filled me.

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to bee melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as
your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and
unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.

Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances — a passion for work.

No, I mean really listen. 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.

I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility

Attention without feeling is only a report.

لا أريد أن أتساءل في حيرة
هل صنعت شيئا من حياتي،
لا..
لا أريد..
أن أتحسر أو أخاف،
أو أن أغوص في جدال.
أنا فقط أريد..
ألا ينتهي بي المطاف..
كعابرة سبيل... في هذه الحياة.

Sleep comes its little while. Then I wake in the valley of midnight or three a.m. to the first fragrances of spring which is coming, all by itself, no matter what.

I began to pick through the red rivers
of confusion;

I began to take apart
the deep stitches
of nightmares.

That God had a plan, I do not doubt.

But what if His plan was, that we would do better?

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.

The wasp sits on the porch of her paper castle.

Does the hummingbird think he himself invented his crimson throat?
He is wiser than that, I think.

And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one — the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself — is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed.