653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive – that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions – even to a certainty – as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s wings. This, too, I suggest, is the weather, and worthy of report.

A Voice from I Don’t Know Where.

Of course! The path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn – dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.

And probably, if they don’t waste time looking for an easier world, they can do it.

And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness – of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes... open your life, open your hands.

The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms.