Mary Oliver Quotes - Page 6

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars.

Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?

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.

I do not live happily or comfortably With the cleverness of our times. The talk is all about computers, The news is all about bombs and blood. This morning, in the fresh field, I came upon a hidden nest. It held four warm, speckled eggs. I touched them. Then went away softly, Having felt something more wonderful Than all the electricity of New York City.

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.

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

A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist.

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.

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

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world — and there are plenty — very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.

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.

When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it’s going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body as a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. [from the poem "When Death Comes"]

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.

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

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. When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields, yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head and her wet nose touching the face of every one with its petals of silk with its fragrance rising into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen hovered - and easily she adored every blossom not in the serious careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom the way we praise or don't praise - the way we love or don't love - but the way we long to be - that happy in the heaven of earth - that wild, that loving.

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?

With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.