Top 350 Mary Oliver Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

153. “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

154. “More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing – the reason they can fly.”

— Mary Oliver

155. “It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.”

— Mary Oliver

156. “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.”

— Mary Oliver

157. “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

158. “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

159. “He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”

— Mary Oliver

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

164. “It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”

— Mary Oliver

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

171. “The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”

— Mary Oliver

172. “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

173. “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

174. “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

— Mary Oliver

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

178. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

182. “Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”

— Mary Oliver

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

188. “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

189. “For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.”

— Mary Oliver

190. “Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

192. “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

193. “How heron comes It is a negligence of the mind not to notice how at dusk heron comes to the pond and stands there in his death robes, perfect servant of the system, hungry, his eyes full of attention, his wings pure light.”

— Mary Oliver

194. “That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die.”

— Mary Oliver

195. “Do you cherish your humble and silky life?”

— Mary Oliver

196. “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 the powers of observing.”

— Mary Oliver

197. “If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

199. “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

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

— Mary Oliver