“When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.”

“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.”

“Love SorrowLove sorrow. She is yours now, and you musttake care of what has beengiven. Brush her hair, help herinto her little coat, hold her hand,especially when crossing a street. For, think,what if you should lose her? Then you would besorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessnesswould be yours. Take care, touchher forehead that she feel herself not soutterly alone. And smile, that she does notaltogether forget the world before the lesson.Have patience in abundance. And do notever lie or ever leave her even for a momentby herself, which is to say, possibly, again,abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.And amazing things can happen. And you may see,as the two of you gowalking together in the morning light, howlittle by little she relaxes; she looks about her;she begins to grow.”

“eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in…And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a starBoth intimate and ultimate, And you will be heart-shaken and respectful. And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisperOh let me, for a while longer, enter the twoBeautiful bodies of your lungs...Look, and look again.This world is not just a little thrill for your eyes.It’s more than bones.It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.It’s more than the beating of a single heart.It’s praising.It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.You have a life- just imagine that!You have this day, and maybe another, and maybeStill another…And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned, I have become younger.And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”

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

“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. 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?”

“The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they’re full of bicycle trails. And this is happening to the world, and I think it is very very dangerous for our future generations, those of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state, but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?[from 'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver for NPR Books]”