Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work reflects a deep communion with the natural world. Inspirational Mary Oliver quotes will encourage you to think a little deeper than you usually would and broaden your perspective.
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Famous Mary Oliver Quotes
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things to love what is mortal to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Mary Oliver
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. Mary Oliver
Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day which is what I did. Mary Oliver
Listen are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? Mary Oliver
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. Mary Oliver
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life. Mary Oliver
Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they’re thirsty. That’s prayer. They don’t live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along. Mary Oliver
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. 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. Mary Oliver
What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven. Mary Oliver
The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they’re full of bicycle trails. Mary Oliver
It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway. Mary Oliver
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. Mary Oliver
And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain. Mary Oliver
I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn’t think of it as a career. I didn’t even think of it as a profession It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. Mary Oliver
I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back. Mary Oliver
There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay. Mary Oliver
We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it. Mary Oliver
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all. Mary Oliver
When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included. Mary Oliver
Wasn’t it Emerson who said, My life is for itself and not for a spectacle? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private. Mary Oliver
After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world. Mary Oliver
To tell you the truth, I believe everything tigers, trees, stones are sentient in one way or another. You’d never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example. Mary Oliver
When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. Mary Oliver
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. 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. Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness. Mary Oliver
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else. Mary Oliver
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. Mary Oliver
And now I understand something so frightening & wonderful how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar. Mary Oliver
You can have the other words chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it. Mary Oliver
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. Mary Oliver
Poetry is a life cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Mary Oliver
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it will break open and never close again to the rest of the world. Mary Oliver
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too. Mary Oliver
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world. Mary Oliver
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break. Mary Oliver
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. Mary Oliver
So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you. Mary Oliver
In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Mary Oliver
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist. Mary Oliver
Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust. Mary Oliver
Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Mary Oliver
Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Mary Oliver
Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Mary Oliver
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier? Mary Oliver
