QUOTES by Mary Oliver
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
“The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“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”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you finally figured out what beauty is for?
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“ANGELS You might see an angel anytime and anywhere. Of course you have to open your eyes to a kind of second level, but it’s not really hard. 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. For myself, but not for other people. That’s a place you just can’t get into, not entirely anyway, other people’s heads. I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life be richer than it is, that you bow to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained— are only one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“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?”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“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.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“But mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“FIRST YOGA LESSON “Be a lotus in the pond,” she said, “opening slowly, no single energy tugging against another but peacefully, all together.” I couldn’t even touch my toes. “Feel your quadriceps stretching?” she asked. Well, something was certainly stretching. Standing impressively upright, she raised one leg and placed it against the other, then lifted her arms and shook her hands like leaves. “Be a tree,” she said. I lay on the floor, exhausted. But to be a lotus in the pond opening slowly, and very slowly rising— that I could do.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“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.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain - long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“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.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“LONELINESS I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation. Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. Are you following me?”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“I had to go away for a few days so I called the kennel and made an appointment. I guess Bear overheard the conversation. “Love and company,” said Bear, “are the adornments that change everything. I know they’ll be nice to me, but I’ll be sad, sad, sad.” And pitifully he wrung his paws. I cancelled the trip.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“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.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing towards you.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“No, I'd never been to this country before. No, I didn't know where the roads would lead me. No, I didn't intend to turn back.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver
“This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn — dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about 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.”
Quote by -Mary Oliver