Mary Oliver

"she always carries a notebook. That’s one of her trademarks. And she said to me, “If you don’t have a notebook, you don’t get it again. You have to write things down as they come to you.”"

"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

"And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar."

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

"I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion — that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

"Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?"

"Am I not among the early risers and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider the perfection of the morning star above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees blue in the first light? Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though sheets of water flowed over them though it is only wind, that common thing, free to everyone, and everything?"

"What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?"

"Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same."

"Here is where it -- you are alone in your head, you are all alone inside your brain. and that makes it impossible to believe that anything, everything and anyone that you own, love or hateis real. we will never know if we are living or dreaming."

"What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw."

"You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it."

"I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same."

"Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death."

"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."

"Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light."

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

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

"My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness"

"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."

"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."

"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."

"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."

"So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God,one of which was you."

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

"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."

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

"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed."

"Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable."

"Poets—incredible nature poets like Mary Oliver, Gabriela Mistral, or Audre Lorde—look deeply at the world and make us feel like we are connected. Poetry that addresses the natural world helps us repair that connection. When you are paying attention to something, it’s a way of loving something. How can we continue to hurt something that we love?"

"Mary Oliver wanted to smell flowering pink bushes/and blossoming trees in Texas./Pull over, she said, at more than one corner. She/needed to absorb the scents./A city wasn't just a name./In her presence, babies might sing for the first time./She is like that."

"It’s a poem that becomes like an emblem poem for people."

"As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town."

"God works in mysterious ways."