Mary Oliver Quotes

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“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

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

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

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

“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.”

“It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”

“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.”

“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.”