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You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

Mary Oliver

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Mary Oliver
Age: 83 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: January 17
Climate Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maple Heights
Ohio
Mary Jane Oliver
Truth
Need
Aloud
Needs
Mistakes
World
Cry
Mistake
Sound
Tell
Doesn

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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And I say to my heart: rave on.
Mary Oliver
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Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.
Mary Oliver
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Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Mary Oliver
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When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.
Mary Oliver
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I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.
Mary Oliver
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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
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At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?
Mary Oliver
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I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
Mary Oliver
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Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Mary Oliver
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It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is a river many voices travel in it poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless each arrives in an historical context almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.
Mary Oliver
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On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
Mary Oliver
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All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.
Mary Oliver
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The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things
Mary Oliver
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Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.
Mary Oliver
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A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them ... 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. . .
Mary Oliver
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Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
Mary Oliver
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The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver