Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame.”

— Mary Oliver

152. “The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.”

— Mary Oliver

153. “If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves. If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt. But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation. I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster. And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with some small and easy story.”

— Mary Oliver

154. “And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?”

— Mary Oliver

155. “Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.”

— Mary Oliver

156. “I believe everything has a soul.”

— Mary Oliver

157. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

159. “The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

161. “Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

163. “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

164. “Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.”

— Mary Oliver

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

171. “Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

174. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

195. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

198. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

200. “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