Top 380 Mary Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier?”

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

357. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

369. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

395. “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

396. “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