Mary Oliver: Trending quotes (page 5)

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”

“Be prepared. A dog is adorable and noble.
A dog is a true and loving friend. A dog
is also a hedonist.”

“I have a little dog who likes to nap with me.
He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck.
He is sweeter than soap.
He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace,
which can't even bark…”

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

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

“And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.”

“Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.”

“Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that
and the years before that
you were not.”

“Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though
sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing,
free to everyone, and everything?”

“What countries, what visitations,
what pomp
would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?”

“Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.”