653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

Listen – are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

I, too, have been forced to stand close to it, and have felt the almost muscular agony of impotence before it, unable to interfere or assuage or do anything effective. Though I do – oh yes I do – believe the soul is improvable. Oh sweet and defiant hope! 5.

I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you’re sexually abused, there’s a lot of damage.

All things are inventions of holiness. Some more rascally than others. I.

I believe everything has a soul.

Okay, I said. But remember, you can’t fix everything in the world for everybody. “However,” said Ricky, “you can’t do anything at all unless you begin.

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing – an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness – wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company.

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.

I don’t know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I’ll think I’m going to drown in the shimmering miles of it...