Quote

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.

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
Purpose
Knees
Inspirational
Desert
Body
Miles
Good
Loves
Love
Hundred
Walk
Repenting
Walks
Repent
Animal
Soft

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
Mary Oliver
Image
We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.
Mary Oliver
Image
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
Mary Oliver
Image
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
Mary Oliver
Image
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.
Mary Oliver
Image
What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
Mary Oliver
Image
With words, I could build a world I could live in. 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
Image
In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
Mary Oliver
Image
When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then. So I try not to miss anything. I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moon or the slipper of its coming back. Or, a kiss. Well, yes, especially a kiss.
Mary Oliver
Image
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
Mary Oliver
Image
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
Image
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
Mary Oliver
Image
It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
Mary Oliver
Image
...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
Image
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
Mary Oliver
Image
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver
Image
Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
Image
... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.
Mary Oliver