Mary Oliver

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”

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

“Sometimes I needonly to standwherever I am to be blessed.”

“Love, love, love, says Percy.And hurry as fast as you canalong the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep.Give up your body heat, your beating heart.Then, trust.”

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force.”

“The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.”

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”

“there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own,that kept you companyas you strode deeper and deeperinto the world,determined to dothe only thing you could do --determined to savethe only life you could save.”

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

“The god of dirtcame up to me many times and saidso many wise and delectable things, I layon the grass listeningto his dog voice,frog voice; now,he said, and now,and never once mentioned foreverfrom, One or Two Things”

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

“I tell you thisto break your heart,by which I mean onlythat it break open and never close againto the rest of the world.”

“I know many lives worth living.”

“the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds,and there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own”

“In Blackwater WoodsLook, the treesare turningtheir own bodiesinto pillarsof light,are giving off the richfragrance of cinnamonand fulfillment,the long tapersof cattailsare bursting and floating away overthe blue shouldersof the ponds,and every pond,no matter what itsname is, isnameless now.Every yeareverythingI have ever learnedin my lifetimeleads back to this: the firesand the black river of losswhose other sideis salvation,whose meaningnone of us will ever know.To live in this worldyou must be ableto do three things:to love what is mortal;to hold itagainst your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go.”

“GOING TO WALDENIt isn't very far as highways lie.I might be back by nightfall, having seenThe rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!Many have gone, and think me half a foolTo miss a day away in the cool country.Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,Going to Walden is not so easy a thingAs a green visit. It is the slow and difficultTrick of living, and finding it where you are.”

“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

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

“My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums...”

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.--from WHEN DEATH COMES”

“And now I understand something so frightening &wonderful-how the mind clings to the road it knows,rushing through crossroads, stickinglike lint to the familiar.”

“Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the faces of the tulipsand the nodding morning glories,and into the windows of, even, themiserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was,dear star, that just happensto be where you are in the universeto keep us from ever-darkness,to ease us with warm touching,to hold us in the great hands of light –good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the dayin happiness, in kindness.”

“You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –over and over announcing your placein the family of things.”

“to live in this worldyou must be ableto do three thingsto love what is mortal;to hold itagainst your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go”

“Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”

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

“The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.”

“The Poet With His Face In His HandsYou want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need anymore of that sound.So if you’re going to do it and can’t stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t hold it in, at least go by yourself acrossthe forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheetslike crazy, and there is a cave behind all that jubilation and water fun and you can stand there, under it, and roar all youwant and nothing will be disturbed; you can drip with despair all afternoon and still, on a green branch, its wings just lightly touchedby the passing foil of the water, the thrush, puffing out its spotted breast, will sing of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.”

“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”