Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935) is an American poet. She has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."
You, too, can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.
On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
. . . Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open.
Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.
Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinking of sitting out on the sand to watch the moon rise. Full tonight. So we go and the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think about time and space, makes me take measure of myself: one iota pondering heaven. Thus we sit, I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. As though I were his perfect moon.
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? 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. Instructions for living a life: pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.