653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain – long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.

The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees – to learn something by being nothing.

What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.