Mary Oliver Quotes

212 quotes in 2402 categories

• Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the…
• Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.
• Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we…
• Attention is the beginning of devotion.
• On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
• And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
• And I say to my heart: rave on.
• What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
• When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until…
• Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
• I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
• There is only one question: / how to love this world.
• 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…
• Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there.…
• I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with…
• I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
• Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it…
• My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
• This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
• When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms,…

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