653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn’t come easy.

How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination. The Soul at Last The Lord’s terrifying kindness has come to me. It was only a small silvery thing – say a piece of silver cloth, or a thousand spider webs woven together, or a small handful of aspen leaves, with their silver backs shimmering. And.

What will you do with your one precious, wild life?

No, I’d never been to this country before. No, I didn’t know where the roads would lead me. No, I didn’t intend to turn back.

What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

When men sell their souls, where do the souls go?

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter, and in which to feel.

Today I’m flying low and I’m not saying a word. I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I’m taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I’m traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.