Mary Oliver: Trending quotes

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Mary Oliver: 196 quotes53 likes

“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. Yes indeed.”

Mary Oliver

Variant: 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.
Source: A Poetry Handbook

“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.”

Mary Oliver

Source: Upstream: Selected Essays

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

Mary Oliver

Source: Dog Songs

“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…”

Mary Oliver

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

Mary Oliver

“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.”

Mary Oliver

Source: New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1

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

Mary Oliver

Source: Why I Wake Early

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

Mary Oliver

"Sand Dabs, Six"
Winter Hours (1999)

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

Mary Oliver

"Sand Dabs, Five"
Winter Hours (1999)

“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.”

Mary Oliver

"Sometimes", § 1
Red Bird (2008)

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

Mary Oliver

"The Poet With His Face in His Hands"
New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2005)

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

Mary Oliver

"Evidence"
Evidence (2009)

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

Mary Oliver

"If the philosopher is right"
Red Bird (2008)

“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?”

Mary Oliver

"Am I Not Among the Early Risers"
West Wind (1997)

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

Mary Oliver

"Am I Not Among the Early Risers"
West Wind (1997)

“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.”

Mary Oliver

"Am I Not Among the Early Risers"
West Wind (1997)