Mary Oliver Poetry

"You listen and you know you could live a better life than you do. Be softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will be able to do it."

“Look, hasn’t my body already felt like the body of a flower? Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it.”

Look! and then we will be like the pale cool stones, that last almost forever.”

“Look! for most the world is waiting or remembering—most of the world is time when we’re not here, not born yet, or died—a slow fire under the earth with all our dumb wild blind cousins who also can’t even remember anymore their own happiness—

“Not often, but now and again there’s a moment when the heart cries aloud: yes, I am willing to be that wild darkness, that long, blue body of light.”

“When I have to die, I would like to die on a day of rain—long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.”

"There is the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness."

"Softest of mornings, hello. And what will you do today, I wonder, to my heart?"

"I live in music, in words, in the fires of the heart."

"I do not want to be frisky, and theatrical. I do not want to go forward in the parade of names. I do not want to be diligent or necessary or in any way heavy. From my mouth to God’s ear, I swear it; I want only to be a song."

"Be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part."

"You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better."

"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."

"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."

"Our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing."