Mary Oliver Quotes

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers

Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.

"What is your heart doing now? "Remembering. Remembering!

Let the world
have its way with you,
luminous as it is with mystery
and pain — graced as it is
with the ordinary.

Beaver Moon - The Suicide of a Friend

When somewhere life
breaks like a pane of glass,
and from every direction casual
voices are bringing you the news,
you say: I should have known.
You say: I should have been aware. That last Friday he looked
so ill, like an old mountain-climber
lost on the white trails, listening
to the ice breaking upward, under
his worn-out shoes. You say: I heard rumors of trouble, but after all
we all have that. You say:
What could I have done? and you go
with the rest, to bury him. That night, you turn in your bed
to watch the moon rise, and once more
see what a small coin it is
against the darkness, and how everything else
is a mystery, and you know
nothing at all except
the moonlight is beautiful-
white rivers running together
along the bare boughs of the trees- and somewhere, for someone, life
is becoming moment by moment
unbearable.

But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.

"Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads."

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.

I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

The snails on the pink sleds of their bodies are moving
among the morning glories
The spider is asleep among the red thumbs
of the raspberries.

quickly found for myself two such blessings — the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.

I don't want to end up simply having visited the world.

The Moths

There's a kind of white moth, I don't know
what kind, that glimmers
by mid-May
in the forest, just
as the pink moccasin flowers
are rising.

If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.

And anyway
I was so full of energy.
I was always running around, looking
at this and that.

If I stopped
the pain
was unbearable.

If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world
can't be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.

Finally, I had noticed enough.
All around me in the forest
the white moths floated.

How long do they live, fluttering
in and out of the shadows?

You aren't much, I said
one day to my reflection
in a green pond,
and grinned.

The wings of the moths catch the sunlight
and burn
so brightly.

At night, sometimes,
they slip between the pink lobes
of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn,
motionless
in those dark halls of honey.