Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

— Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver Quotes

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

— Mary Oliver
Sad About Life Sorrow Healing Grief Grief

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

— Mary Oliver
Life Motivational About Life Life Lessons Choices Mindfulness

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.

— Mary Oliver
Life is Beautiful Life for Women

You must not ever stop being whimsical.

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.

— Mary Oliver
Reading

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.

— Mary Oliver

Life is much the same when it’s going well – resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster’s seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?

— Mary Oliver

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

— Mary Oliver

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.

— Mary Oliver

Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement – how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday!

— 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.

— Mary Oliver

The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe.

— Mary Oliver

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

— Mary Oliver

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

— Mary Oliver

The man who has many answers is often found in the theaters of information where he offers, graciously, his deep findings. While the man who has only questions, to comfort himself, makes music.

— Mary Oliver

You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.

— Mary Oliver

Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It’s duty.

— Mary Oliver

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

— Mary Oliver

I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

— Mary Oliver
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