Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.”

— Mary Oliver

152. “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.”

— Mary Oliver

153. “How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?”

— Mary Oliver

154. “The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change.”

— Mary Oliver

155. “I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn’t just an idea.”

— Mary Oliver

156. “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. It is not even a walk we take together.”

— Mary Oliver

157. “In creative work – creative work of all kinds – those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

159. “One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.”

— Mary Oliver

160. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

161. “I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.”

— Mary Oliver

162. “Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.”

— Mary Oliver

163. “People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don’t want fancy work.”

— Mary Oliver

164. “And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, that is better than these light-filled bodies?”

— Mary Oliver

165. “All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars and the shining mysterious pond water itself... May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream.”

— Mary Oliver

166. “What can we do about God, who makes and then breaks every god-forsaken, beautiful day?”

— Mary Oliver

167. “Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.”

— Mary Oliver

168. “This is the lesson of age – events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different.”

— Mary Oliver

169. “When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain – long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.”

— Mary Oliver

170. “A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry.”

— Mary Oliver

171. “A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.”

— Mary Oliver

172. “And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.”

— Mary Oliver

173. “The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things.”

— Mary Oliver

174. “And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”

— Mary Oliver

175. “Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?”

— Mary Oliver

176. “And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.”

— Mary Oliver

177. “I don’t know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to drown in the shimmering miles of it...”

— Mary Oliver

178. “Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another – why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.”

— Mary Oliver

179. “Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with the fragrance of the fields and the freshness of the oceans which you have made, and help me to hear and to hold in all dearness those exacting and wonderful words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying: Follow me.”

— Mary Oliver

180. “I think this is the prettiest world – so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?”

— Mary Oliver

181. “All my life I have been restless – I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss – than wholeness – than staying at home.”

— Mary Oliver

182. “Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.”

— Mary Oliver

183. “Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive – that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.”

— Mary Oliver

184. “And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.”

— Mary Oliver

185. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

186. “Life is much the same when it’s going well – resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster’s seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?”

— Mary Oliver

187. “Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?”

— Mary Oliver

188. “Okay, I said. But remember, you can’t fix everything in the world for everybody. “However,” said Ricky, “you can’t do anything at all unless you begin.”

— Mary Oliver

189. “Look, hasn’t my body already felt like the body of a flower?”

— Mary Oliver

190. “Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.”

— Mary Oliver

191. “Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vain-glory is the bane of us, the humans.”

— Mary Oliver

192. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.”

— Mary Oliver

193. “Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly.”

— Mary Oliver

194. “I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.”

— Mary Oliver

195. “No, I’d never been to this country before. No, I didn’t know where the roads would lead me. No, I didn’t intend to turn back.”

— Mary Oliver

196. “Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation.”

— Mary Oliver

197. “You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world – and there are plenty – very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.”

— Mary Oliver

198. “Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame.”

— Mary Oliver

199. “The wasp sits on the porch of her paper castle.”

— Mary Oliver

200. “A Voice from I Don’t Know Where.”

— Mary Oliver