Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.”

— Mary Oliver

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

305. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “What is my name, o what is my name that I may offer it back to the beautiful world? Have I walked long enough where the sea breaks raspingly all day and all night upon the pale sand?”

— Mary Oliver

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

323. “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

324. “I know a lot of fancy words. I tear them from my heart and my tongue. Then I pray.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

327. “To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.”

— Mary Oliver

328. “I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.”

— Mary Oliver

329. “Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps?”

— Mary Oliver

330. “Here is an amazement – once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.”

— Mary Oliver

331. “Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

— Mary Oliver

332. “This I have always known – that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come someday to bitter and mortal regret.”

— Mary Oliver

333. “To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air.”

— Mary Oliver

334. “How sometimes everything closes up, a painted fan, landscapes and moments flowing together until the sense of distance – say, between Clapp’s Pond and me – vanishes, edges slide together like the feathers of a wing, everything touches everything.”

— Mary Oliver

335. “Memory: a golden bowl, or a basement without light. For which reason the nightmare comes with its painful story and says: you need to know this. Some memories I would give anything to forget. Others I would not give up upon the point of death, they are the bright hawks of my life.”

— Mary Oliver

336. “This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn – dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.”

— Mary Oliver

337. “The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.”

— Mary Oliver

338. “The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.”

— Mary Oliver

339. “Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”

— Mary Oliver

340. “But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record – that is, not words but a reality.”

— Mary Oliver

341. “Nobody owns the hearts of birds.”

— Mary Oliver

342. “Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?”

— Mary Oliver

343. “And probably, if they don’t waste time looking for an easier world, they can do it.”

— Mary Oliver

344. “The world has need of dreamers as well as shoemakers.”

— Mary Oliver

345. “How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?”

— Mary Oliver

346. “What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?”

— Mary Oliver

347. “I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.”

— Mary Oliver

348. “Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart – to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.”

— Mary Oliver

349. “For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water.”

— Mary Oliver

350. “My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It’s early work, derivative work.”

— Mary Oliver

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