653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.

Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly.

Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement – how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday!

To understand many things you must reach out of your own condition.

Well, who knows. Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window between him and the darkness. Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city – turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination.

A poet’s interest in craft never fades, of course.

Life is much the same when it’s going well – resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster’s seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?

If you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.