Mary Oliver Quotes

As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.

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

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?

Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.

There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.

All eternity is in the moment.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.

Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.

And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.

Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.

I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.

I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.

Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

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.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.

Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.

Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.

The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.

The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.

There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.

If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.

You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

You must not ever stop being whimsical.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open.

Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation

The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe.

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?