Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language.”

— Mary Oliver

204. “Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.”

— Mary Oliver

205. “To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.”

— Mary Oliver

206. “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

207. “Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

209. “This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it – to look around and love the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.”

— Mary Oliver

210. “In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.”

— Mary Oliver

211. “A fact: one picks it up and reads it, and puts it down, and there is an end to it. But an idea! That one may pick up, and reflect upon, and oppose, and expand, and so pass a delightful afternoon altogether.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Reading Quotes

213. “We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story...”

— Mary Oliver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Mary Oliver

215. “As a carpenter can make a gibbet as well as an altar, a writer can describe the world as trivial or exquisite, as material or as idea, as senseless or as purposeful. Words are wood.”

— Mary Oliver

216. “The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work – who is thus responsible to the work.”

— Mary Oliver

217. “The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”

— Mary Oliver

218. “Inside every mind, there’s a hermit’s cave full of light.”

— Mary Oliver

219. “I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

221. “But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing – an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness – wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company.”

— Mary Oliver

222. “All culture developed as some wild, raw creature strived to live better and longer.”

— Mary Oliver

223. “The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

225. “I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.”

— Mary Oliver

226. “I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.”

— Mary Oliver

227. “To understand many things you must reach out of your own condition.”

— Mary Oliver

228. “Admiring is easy, but affinity, that does take some time.”

— Mary Oliver

229. “About God, how could he give up his secrets and still be God?”

— Mary Oliver

230. “I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.”

— Mary Oliver

231. “What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? Would would this would be like without dogs?”

— Mary Oliver

232. “THE DISTINCTION and particular value of anything, or any person, inevitably must alter according to the time and place from which we take our view.”

— Mary Oliver

233. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Mary Oliver

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

250. “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