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Mary Oliver Quotes

Total quotes: 23
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
— Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Tagged: Poetry
“Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Knowledge, Philosophy, Curiosity, Good writing, Quote of the Moment
“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, Upstream
Tagged: Writing, Nature, Spirituality, Self-improvement, becoming better
“Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”
— Mary Oliver, West Wind
Tagged: Life, Living, Living Fully, Being Alive, Life and Existence
“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
— Mary Oliver, When Death Comes
Tagged: Life
“Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.”
— Mary Oliver, Devotions
Tagged: Poetry, Answers, Politics, Religion
“Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.”
— Mary Oliver, via Facebook
Tagged: Happiness, Life, Idealist, Inspirational
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Good writing, Poetry, Women, teenagers
“And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Life, How to be good, A Good Life
“The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work -- who is thus responsible to the work.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Writing, How to be a writer, The creative habit, Art
“Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Writing, Nature
“I don't know if I am heading toward heaven or that other, dark place, but I know I have already lived in heaven for fifty years. Thank you, Provincetown.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Provincetown, Places, Home, Good writing
“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Writing, How to be a writer, Good writing, Creation
“Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”
— Mary Oliver, Snowy Night
Tagged: Snow
“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Nature, Poetry, Writing, How to be a writer
“Let me always be who I am, and then some.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: How to be a writer, self, Quote of the Moment
“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.”
— Mary Oliver, Wild Geese: Selected Poems
Tagged: Letting Go, life advice
“He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Writing, Nature, Why we believe what we believe
“Write first with a pen. It’s too easy on the computer to change a word, then forget what it was. Also, don’t get too social. Write for whatever holy thing you believe in, not for your poetry workshop fellows. And dare once in a while to throw a poem away. The main thing is to know that your craving to write is the big thing and will continue, and is more valuable than the finished poem.”
— Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver Writer's Almanac Interview
Tagged: Writing, How to be a writer
“Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Creation, Writing, How to be a writer
“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. 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.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
Tagged: Creation, Writing, How to be a writer
“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.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
— Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Tagged: Poetry, How To Think
“I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours. … If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or 5 and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did.”
— Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver Writer's Almanac Interview
Tagged: Writing, How to be a writer
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