Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.”

— Mary Oliver

252. “Especially when writers are just starting out, the emphasis should be not only upon what they write, but equally upon the process of writing. A successful class is a class where no one feels that ‘writer’s block’ is a high-priority subject.”

— Mary Oliver

253. “But if they were only shadow-companions, still they were constant, and powerful, and amazing.”

— Mary Oliver

254. “I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child’s voice – I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating – its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.”

— Mary Oliver

255. “A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist.”

— Mary Oliver

256. “I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes... open your life, open your hands.”

— Mary Oliver

257. “I know many lives worth living.”

— Mary Oliver

258. “There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled. Like, telling someone you love them. Or giving your money away, all of it. Your heart is beating, isn’t it? You’re not in chains, are you? There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”

— Mary Oliver

259. “I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you’re sexually abused, there’s a lot of damage.”

— Mary Oliver

260. “You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.”

— Mary Oliver

261. “I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.”

— Mary Oliver

262. “I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people, they exist, and that they dance.”

— Mary Oliver

263. “I have a little dog who likes to nap with me. He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck. He is sweeter than soap. He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace, which can’t even bark...”

— Mary Oliver

264. “And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.”

— Mary Oliver

265. “God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely.”

— Mary Oliver

266. “And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.”

— Mary Oliver

267. “I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.”

— Mary Oliver

268. “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”

— Mary Oliver

269. “Invention hovers always a little above the rules.”

— Mary Oliver

270. “Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window between him and the darkness. Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city – turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.”

— Mary Oliver

271. “Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules.”

— Mary Oliver

272. “All things are inventions of holiness. Some more rascally than others. I.”

— Mary Oliver

273. “What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon.”

— Mary Oliver

274. “For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.”

— Mary Oliver

275. “I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.”

— Mary Oliver

276. “Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields – and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.”

— Mary Oliver

277. “But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.”

— Mary Oliver

278. “No poet ever wrote a poem to dishonor life, to compromise high ideals, to scorn religious views, to demean hope or gratitude, to argue against tenderness, to place rancor before love, or to praise littleness of soul. Not one. Not ever.”

— Mary Oliver

279. “Belief isn’t always easy. But this much I have learned – if not enough else – to live with my eyes open.”

— Mary Oliver

280. “On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?”

— Mary Oliver

281. “We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions – even to a certainty – as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s wings. This, too, I suggest, is the weather, and worthy of report.”

— Mary Oliver

282. “We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen.”

— Mary Oliver

283. “Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.”

— Mary Oliver

284. “LONELINESS I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!”

— Mary Oliver

285. “And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness – the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books – can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”

— Mary Oliver

286. “Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.”

— Mary Oliver

287. “I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.”

— Mary Oliver

288. “Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

290. “I simply was not able to risk wrecking her world, and I could see no possible way I could move the whole kingdom. So I left her with the only thing I could – the certainty of a little more time.”

— Mary Oliver

291. “To believe in the soul – to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view – imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world!”

— Mary Oliver

292. “It’s very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can’t wait until morning-it’ll be gone.”

— Mary Oliver

293. “Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It’s duty.”

— Mary Oliver

294. “And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”

— Mary Oliver

295. “I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.”

— Mary Oliver

296. “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

297. “My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.”

— Mary Oliver

298. “A poet’s interest in craft never fades, of course.”

— Mary Oliver

299. “Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part – the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.”

— Mary Oliver

300. “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