653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don’t want fancy work.

May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.

Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving.

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars.

The wasp sits on the porch of her paper castle.

To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air.

It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.

I walk in the world to love it.