Mary Oliver Quotes - Page 5

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.

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 ... 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. . .

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

The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinking of sitting out on the sand to watch the moon rise. Full tonight. So we go and the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think about time and space, makes me take measure of myself: one iota pondering heaven. Thus we sit, I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. As though I were his perfect moon.

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

Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.

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.

How many mysteries have you seen in your lifetime? How many nets pulled full over the boat's side, each silver body ready or not falling into submission? How many roses in early summer uncurling above the pale sands then falling back in unfathomable willingness? And what can you say? Glory to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the silver fish. Glory to time and the wild fields, and to joy. And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.

I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of 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.

Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.

Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?

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

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

When it's over I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

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

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

The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.

But how did you come burning down like a wild needle, knowing just where my heart was?

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.

And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.

Mornings at Blackwater" For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.