653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again~ wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began....

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

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

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention...

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.

Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.