"What can we do about God, who makes and then breaks every god-forsaken, beautiful day?"
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Quote collection
Mary Oliver quotes (page 10 of 14)
280 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields, yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head and her wet nose touching the face of every one with its petals of silk with its fragrance rising into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen hovered - and easily she adored every blossom not in the serious careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom the way we praise or don't praise - the way we love or don't love - but the way we long to be - that happy in the heaven of earth - that wild, that loving."
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"I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home."
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"What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven."
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"Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?"
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"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."
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"I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write."
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"I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying."
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"I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read."
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"I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too."
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"Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song."
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"Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth."
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"My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work."
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"I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life."
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"When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing."
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"Mornings at Blackwater" For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life."
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"Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude."
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"I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do."
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"With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation."
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"When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world."
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