653 Quotes by Mary Oliver

As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules.Sometimes there are no rules.

Are the roses not also--even as the owl is--excessive? Each flower is small and lovely, but in their sheer and silent abundance the roses become an immutable force, as though the work of the wild roses was to make sure that all of us, who come wandering over the sand, may be, for a while, struck to the heart and saturated with a simple joy.

No, I mean really listen. Here's a story, and you don't have to visit manyhouses to find it. One person is talking,the other one is not really listening.someone can look like they are but they'reactually thinking about something they want to say, or their minds are justwandering. Or they're looking at thatlittle box people hold in their hands thesedays. And people get discouraged, so theyquit trying. And the very quiet people,you may have noticed, are often the sadpeople.

Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields— and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.

All I know is that "thank you" should appear somewhere.So just in case I can't findthe perfect place- "Thank you, thank you.

No poet ever wrote a poem to dishonor life, to compromise high ideals, to scorn religious views, to demean hope or gratitude, to argue against tenderness, to place rancor before love, or to praise littleness of soul. Not one. Not ever.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

All morning it has been raining. In the language of the garden, this is happiness.