653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination...

...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.

Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.

... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

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.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.