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Mary Oliver Quotes
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Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterized by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. September 1935 – 17. January 2019  •  Other names مری الیور
Mary Oliver: 98 quotes53 likes

Mary Oliver Quotes

“I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.”

Mary Oliver

Source: A Thousand Mornings

“THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules.”

Mary Oliver

Source: A Thousand Mornings

“We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much.”

Mary Oliver

Source: Dog Songs

“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”

Mary Oliver

“The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things,
I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever

from, One or Two Things”

Mary Oliver

Source: Dream Work

“There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?”

Mary Oliver

Source: New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1

“Things take the time they take.
Don't worry.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?”

Mary Oliver

“Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.”

Mary Oliver

Source: What Do We Know

“Come with me into the woods where spring is
advancing, as it does, no matter what,
not being singular or particular, but one
of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.”

Mary Oliver

Source: Dog Songs

“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

“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)