Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

203. “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

204. “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

205. “Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

207. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

210. “Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”

— Mary Oliver

211. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

213. “I forgive them their unhappiness, I forgive them for walking out of the world. But I don’t forgive them for turning their faces away, for taking off their veils and dancing for death – for hurtling toward oblivion on the sharp blades of their exquisite poems, saying: this is the way.”

— Mary Oliver

214. “And now you’ll be telling stories of my coming back and they won’t be false, and they won’t be true but they’ll be real.”

— Mary Oliver

215. “How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination. The Soul at Last The Lord’s terrifying kindness has come to me. It was only a small silvery thing – say a piece of silver cloth, or a thousand spider webs woven together, or a small handful of aspen leaves, with their silver backs shimmering. And.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

217. “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

218. “I had to go away for a few days so I called the kennel and made an appointment. I guess Bear overheard the conversation. “Love and company,” said Bear, “are the adornments that change everything. I know they’ll be nice to me, but I’ll be sad, sad, sad.” And pitifully he wrung his paws. I cancelled the trip.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

220. “Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.”

— Mary Oliver

221. “Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.”

— Mary Oliver

222. “A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.”

— Mary Oliver

223. “And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness – of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.”

— Mary Oliver

224. “Winter walks up and down the town swinging his censer, but no smoke or sweetness comes from it, only the sour, metallic frankness of salt and snow.”

— Mary Oliver

225. “Be ignited, or be gone.”

— Mary Oliver

226. “Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.”

— Mary Oliver

227. “I am so vast, uncertain and strange.”

— Mary Oliver

228. “Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.”

— Mary Oliver

229. “You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.”

— Mary Oliver

230. “Song of the Builders On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside to think about God – a worthy pastime. Near me, I saw a single cricket; it was moving the grains of the hillside this way and that way. How great was its energy, how humble its effort. Let us hope it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.”

— Mary Oliver

231. “Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? Well, there is time left – fields everywhere invite you into them.”

— Mary Oliver

232. “Because there is no substitute for vigorous and exact description, I would like to say how your eyes, at twilight, reflect, at the same time, the beauty of the world, and its crimes.”

— Mary Oliver

233. “When I woke the morning light was just slipping in front of the stars and I was covered with blossoms.”

— Mary Oliver

234. “When it’s over I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real...”

— Mary Oliver

235. “Congratulations, if you have changed.”

— Mary Oliver

236. “Are the roses not also – even as the owl is – excessive? Each flower is small and lovely, but in their sheer and silent abundance the roses become an immutable force, as though the work of the wild roses was to make sure that all of us, who come wandering over the sand, may be, for a while, struck to the heart and saturated with a simple joy.”

— Mary Oliver

237. “For the birds who own nothing – the reason they can fly.”

— Mary Oliver

238. “ON THE BEACH On the beach, at dawn: four small stones clearly hugging each other. How many kinds of love might there be in the world, and how many formations might they make and who am I ever to imagine I could know such a marvelous business? When the sun broke it poured willingly its light over the stones that did not move, not at all, just as, to its always generous term, it shed its light on me, my own body that loves, equally, to hug another body.”

— Mary Oliver

239. “That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

— Mary Oliver

240. “On the windless days, when the maples have put forth their deep canopies, and the sky is wearing its new blue immensities, and the wind has dusted itself not an hour ago in some spicy field and hardly touches us as it passes by, what is it we do? We lie down and rest upon the generous earth. Very likely we fall asleep.”

— Mary Oliver

241. “He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a face; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.”

— Mary Oliver

242. “I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter, and in which to feel.”

— Mary Oliver

243. “What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn’t come easy.”

— Mary Oliver

244. “Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased... 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

245. “Who knows what will happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.”

— Mary Oliver

246. “With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.”

— Mary Oliver

247. “What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?”

— Mary Oliver

248. “I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.”

— Mary Oliver

249. “Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough.”

— Mary Oliver

250. “Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of the poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies – in holiness and mirth.”

— Mary Oliver