Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

313. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

315. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

317. “I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves – we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”

— Mary Oliver

318. “What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.”

— Mary Oliver

319. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

326. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

328. “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

329. “How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

331. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

333. “Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier?”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

336. “I suppose they, those lives soaked in evil, are miserable and so they ever despise happiness. I suppose they feel powerless and therefore must exert power wherever they can, which is so often upon those unable to comprehend what is happening, much less defend themselves.”

— Mary Oliver

337. “I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.”

— Mary Oliver

338. “Nobody owns the hearts of birds.”

— Mary Oliver

339. “Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual.”

— Mary Oliver

340. “I’m older than I used to be, and therefore I understand things nobody would think of who’s young and in a hurry.”

— Mary Oliver

341. “It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.”

— Mary Oliver

342. “Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light.”

— Mary Oliver

343. “If I’ve done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

345. “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

346. “I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough’s letters. It says, simply, ‘Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.”

— Mary Oliver

347. “What is your heart doing now? “Remembering. Remembering!”

— Mary Oliver

348. “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

349. “Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances – a passion for work.”

— Mary Oliver

350. “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”

— Mary Oliver