653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.

Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.

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.

maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--

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.

Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation

Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.

The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.