Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door – a thousand opening doors! – past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.”

— Mary Oliver

352. “When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?”

— Mary Oliver

353. “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

354. “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

355. “I, too, have been forced to stand close to it, and have felt the almost muscular agony of impotence before it, unable to interfere or assuage or do anything effective. Though I do – oh yes I do – believe the soul is improvable. Oh sweet and defiant hope! 5.”

— Mary Oliver

356. “Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

358. “Friend, I am becoming desperate. What shall I do? How quickly, if I only knew by what remedy, I would turn from the commotion of my own life. While on and on an on, the sparrow sings.”

— Mary Oliver

359. “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

360. “If it is... not just one’s own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world – that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise – then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.”

— Mary Oliver

361. “I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility.”

— Mary Oliver

362. “One learns thinking about writing, and by talking about writing – but primarily through writing.”

— Mary Oliver

363. “Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.”

— Mary Oliver

364. “But dawn – dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by 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

365. “Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends;.”

— Mary Oliver

366. “I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.”

— Mary Oliver

367. “Dear Bear, it’s no use, the world is like that. So stay where you are, and live long. Someday maybe we’ll wise up and remember what you were: hopeless ambassador of a world that returns now only in poets’ dreams.”

— Mary Oliver

368. “The whole business of what’s reality and what isn’t has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don’t care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.”

— Mary Oliver

369. “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

370. “The point is, you’re you, and that’s for keeps.”

— Mary Oliver

371. “It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty.”

— Mary Oliver

372. “Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.”

— Mary Oliver

373. “Try to find the right place for yourself. If you can’t find it, at least dream of it.”

— Mary Oliver

374. “A poem should always have birds in it.”

— Mary Oliver

375. “How does any of us live in this world? One thing compensates for another, I suppose. Sometimes what’s wrong does not hurt at all, but rather shines like a new moon.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

377. “There was someone I loved who grew old and ill. One by one I watched the fires go out. There was nothing I could do except to remember that we receive then we give back.”

— Mary Oliver

378. “A poem on the page speaks to the listening mind.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

380. “How perfect to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket, but it’s late for all of us. And in truth, the only ship there is, is the ship we are all on, burning the world as we go.”

— Mary Oliver

381. “Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.”

— Mary Oliver

382. “The question is, what will it be like after the last day? Will I float into the sky or will I fray within the earth or a river – remembering nothing? How desperate I would be if I couldn’t remember the sun rising, if I couldn’t remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t even remember, beloved, your beloved name.”

— Mary Oliver

383. “Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight.”

— Mary Oliver

384. “A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them.”

— Mary Oliver

385. “So maybe it was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us all be lost always.”

— Mary Oliver

386. “If this was lost, let us all be lost always.”

— Mary Oliver

387. “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

388. “Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy. Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?”

— Mary Oliver

389. “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

390. “What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die.”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

392. “Let me always be who I am, and then some.”

— Mary Oliver

393. “What shall I do? When I pick up the broom he leaves the room. When I fuss with kindling he runs for the yard. Then he’s back, and we hug for a long time. In his low-to-the-ground chest I can hear his heart slowing down. Then I rub his shoulders and kiss his feet and fondle his long hound ears. Benny, I say, don’t worry. I also know the way the old life haunts the new.”

— Mary Oliver

394. “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

395. “But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world.”

— Mary Oliver

396. “We grew into that perilous place: we grew fond.”

— Mary Oliver