653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely.

Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier?

The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak – to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.

And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.

It is what I was born for – to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over...

There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening. I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved. Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them. If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind.

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? Well, there is time left – fields everywhere invite you into them.

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

The sea isn’t a place but a fact, and a mystery...