75 result(s) for Mary Oliver Quotes.
"Poetry calls for presence. It demands an attentive mind, a sensitive ear, and an open heart."
"What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"
"Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?"
"I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings."
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."
"The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things."
"In the forest, there is a silence and music which cannot be described by any word."
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"Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper?"
"I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world."
"I know so many lives, I couldn't count all the changing leaves – I think they all led back to me."
"Like black leaves, its wings, like the stretching light of the river?"
"Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."
"Tell me a story / where our world dragged out of its cage"
"When it's over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement"
"Things take the time they take. Don’t worry."
"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."
"Sometimes I need / only to stand / wherever I am / to be blessed"
"The dream of my life / is to lie down by a slow river / and stare at the light in the trees"
"It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world"
"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
"When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider // the orderliness of the world. Notice // something you have never noticed before"
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"It’s not the weight you carry but how you carry it—books, bricks, grief—it’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it / when you cannot, and would not, put it down."
"I was a bride married to amazement"
"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
"Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work."
"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."
"When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."
"You must never stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life."
"Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye."
"Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed."
"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."
"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief."
"For how many years did I wander slowly through the forest. What wonder and glory I would have missed had I ever been in a hurry!"
"Instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it."
"It is a serious thing, just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world."
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"In the end, I made a plan, and I sat down to it, this wild and precious life, in the only way I could think to do."
"This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness."
"In the very soul of nature, we find consolation."
"All things are inventions of holiness, some more rascally than others."
"I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds."
"To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."
"Let me keep company always with those who say 'Look!' and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads."
"There is only one question: how to love this world."
"Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable."
"Attention is the beginning of devotion."
"All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming."
"Listen—are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
"For how many years have you gone through the house shutting the windows, while the rain was still five miles away?"
"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
"Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air—an armful of white blossoms?"
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."
"When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."
"The most fulfilling times in my life are those moments when I forget that I’m the poet laureate of the United States."
"The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees—to learn something by being nothing."
"When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement—I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms."
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."
"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting."
"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work."
"I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings."
"Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable."
"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."
"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed."
"To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."
"Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that."
"You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life."
"It mustn't be inherited, it can't be purchased. You must make it, between you."
"I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing."
"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."
"One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice."
"You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it."
"I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing."
"My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast there the blue plums."
"I want the freedom to write poetry when I feel like it. I want the freedom to write poetry when I don't feel like it."
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