653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

It’s very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can’t wait until morning-it’ll be gone.

I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.

Because there is no substitute for vigorous and exact description, I would like to say how your eyes, at twilight, reflect, at the same time, the beauty of the world, and its crimes.

And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.

Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with the fragrance of the fields and the freshness of the oceans which you have made, and help me to hear and to hold in all dearness those exacting and wonderful words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying: Follow me.

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work – who is thus responsible to the work.

The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change.

Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness.

Congratulations, if you have changed.