Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Take
Serendipity
Coincidence
Luck
Exactly
Grace
Chance
Words

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
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
Image
Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
Mary Oliver
Image
What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
Mary Oliver
Image
Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
Mary Oliver
Image
But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.
Mary Oliver
Image
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Mary Oliver
Image
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
Mary Oliver
Image
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 talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.
Mary Oliver
Image
Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?
Mary Oliver
Image
I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Mary Oliver
Image
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Mary Oliver
Image
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
Image
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
Image
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
Mary Oliver
Image
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
Mary Oliver
Image
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver