Mary Oliver Quotes

I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.

What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.

Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents

For the birds who own nothing — the reason they can fly.

What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.

Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function — to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory to the world, that good teacher.

then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that and the years before that you were not.

Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn't amuse me. Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.

I don't know what God is. I don't know what death is. But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.