Mary Oliver

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 Jane Oliver (10 September 1935 – 17 January 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Quotes

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

American Primitive (1983)

• 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.
  • "In Blackwater Woods"

Dream Work (1986)

• 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.
  • "Wild Geese"

• And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.
  • "Robert Schumann"

House of Light (1990)

• 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.
  • "The Ponds"

New and Selected Poems (1992)

• Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
  • "The Summer Day"

Blue Pastures (1995)

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.

• 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.
  • "Of Power and Time"

• I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion — that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
  • "Staying Alive"

West Wind (1997)

Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?

• Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
  • Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

• 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?

  • "Am I Not Among the Early Risers"

• What countries, what visitations,
  what pomp
  would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
  on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
  • "Am I Not Among the Early Risers"

• 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.
  • "Am I Not Among the Early Risers"

Winter Hours (1999)

Winter Hours : Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

• What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.
  • "Sand Dabs, Five"

• 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.
  • "Sand Dabs, Five"

• I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
  Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.
  • "Sand Dabs, Five"

• Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
  • "Sand Dabs, Six"

Blue Iris (2004)

Light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.

• But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.
  • "Poppies"

Why I Wake Early (2004)

• Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
  • "Mindful"

New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2005)

• I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
  • "When Death Comes"

• You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
  • "The Poet With His Face in His Hands"

Thirst (2006)

• My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness
  • "Messenger"

Red Bird (2008)

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

• 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.

  • "Sometimes", § 1

• Instructions for living a life:
  Pay attention.
  Be astonished.
  Tell about it.
  • "Sometimes", § 4

• Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
  Each time it seemed to solve everything.
  Each time it solved a great many things
  but not everything.
  Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
  thoroughly, solved everything.
  • "Sometimes", § 5

• Death waits for me, I know it, around
  one corner or another.
  This doesn't amuse me.
  Neither does it frighten me.

  After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
  It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
  I walked slowly, and listened

  to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

  • "Sometimes", § 7

• So every day
  I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
  of the ideas of God,

  one of which was you.

  • "So every day"

• then you too are a dream

  which last night and the night before that
  and the years before that
  you were not.

  • "If the philosopher is right"

Evidence (2009)

Among the swans there is none called the least,
 or the greatest.

• Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue.
  But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function —
  to excite the viewers toward sublime thought.
  Glory to the world, that good teacher.
  • "Evidence"

• Among the swans there is none called the least,
   or the greatest.
  • "Evidence"

• I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
  • "Evidence"

• Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
  • "Evidence"

Quotes about Mary Oliver

• Poets—incredible nature poets like Mary Oliver, Gabriela Mistral, or Audre Lorde—look deeply at the world and make us feel like we are connected. Poetry that addresses the natural world helps us repair that connection. When you are paying attention to something, it’s a way of loving something. How can we continue to hurt something that we love?
  • Ada Limón Interview (2022)

• Mary Oliver wanted to smell flowering pink bushes/and blossoming trees in Texas./Pull over, she said, at more than one corner. She/needed to absorb the scents./A city wasn't just a name./In her presence, babies might sing for the first time./She is like that.
  • Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)

• It’s a poem that becomes like an emblem poem for people.
  • Naomi Shihab Nye about the poem "Wild Geese" Interview with On Being (2016)

• As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town.
  • Naomi Shihab Nye Interview with On Being (2016)

• she always carries a notebook. That’s one of her trademarks. And she said to me, “If you don’t have a notebook, you don’t get it again. You have to write things down as they come to you.”
  • Kate Tippett On Being (2016)

External links

• Mary Oliver at the Academy of American Poets
• Mary Oliver at Cleveland Arts Prize
• Profile at Beacon Press