Mary Oliver
I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.
Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
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.
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.
Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
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.
I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
My parents didn't care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.
I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.Collection: Sight
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.Collection: Life
Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? 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. Instructions for living a life: pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.Collection: Attention
it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.Collection: Morning
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.Collection: Dream
Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective.Collection: World
I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves-we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other's destiny.Collection: Stars
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.Collection: Morning
Things take the time they take. Don't worry.Collection: Worry
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.Collection: Love
Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?Collection: Dog
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.Collection: Wise
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.Collection: Attitude
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.Collection: One Day
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and lovingCollection: Play
I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Uprising
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from “Mysteries, Yes”)Collection: Inspirational
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.Collection: Kindness
It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.Collection: Morning
And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?Collection: Inspirational
As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.Collection: Dance
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.Collection: Dog
You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.Collection: Details
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.Collection: Rivers
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.Collection: Be Good
This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.Collection: Soul
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone. When I'm alone I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.Collection: Love You
There are things you can’t reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open.Collection: Morning
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.Collection: People
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.Collection: Love
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?Collection: Life
... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.Collection: Risk
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.Collection: Art
Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.Collection: Emotional
Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.Collection: Laughter
Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.Collection: Real
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.Collection: What Matters