653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record – that is, not words but a reality.

It’s morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.

We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen.

I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

How sometimes everything closes up, a painted fan, landscapes and moments flowing together until the sense of distance – say, between Clapp’s Pond and me – vanishes, edges slide together like the feathers of a wing, everything touches everything.

Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it.

Nobody owns the hearts of birds.