Mary Oliver

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“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. Tel...”

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”

“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And mu...”

“Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows o...”

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your 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. When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of...”

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

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”

“About God, how could he give up his secrets and still be God?”

“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.”

“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...”

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”

“How I go to the woods Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don’t really want to be witnessed talkin...”

“The Uses Of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

“Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.”

“The Poet With His Face In His Hands You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need anymore of that sound. So if you’re going to do it and can’t stop yo...”

“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.”

“I Go Down To The Shore I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? An...”