Mary Oliver Quotes

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Mary Oliver

Profession : Poet

Birth : September 10, 1935

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

I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.

Mary Oliver

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Mary Oliver

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.

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 consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

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

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

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.

Mary Oliver

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.

Mary Oliver

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

Mary Oliver

I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.

Mary Oliver

I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.

Mary Oliver

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.

Mary Oliver

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.

Mary Oliver

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

Mary Oliver

I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.

Mary Oliver

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

Mary Oliver

I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.

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