Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “I took one look and fell, hook and tumble.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

253. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes, Quotes About Stories

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

266. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

268. “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

269. “Be ignited, or be gone.”

— Mary Oliver

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

276. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

285. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

293. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

295. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

298. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver