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Mary Oliver Quotes

1935–2019 United States

Mary Jane Oliver (10 September 1935 – 17 January 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

United States
20th-century poets
Authors

Random Mary Oliver quote

32 quotes

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

New and Selected Poems (1992)

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

New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2005)

But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.

Blue Iris (2004)

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Blue Pastures (1995)

Among the swans there is none called the least,
or the greatest.

Evidence (2009)

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

American Primitive (1983)

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds.

Blue Pastures (1995)

I don't know what God is.
I don't know what death is. But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.

Red Bird (2008)

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

Winter Hours (1999)

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.

House of Light (1990)

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.

Thirst (2006)

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

Red Bird (2008)

What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.

Winter Hours (1999)

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Evidence (2009)

Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?

West Wind (1997)

You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

Winter Hours (1999)

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2005)

So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

Red Bird (2008)

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Dream Work (1986)

And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.

Dream Work (1986)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Mary Oliver (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.