Quote

Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again~ wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.

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
Dies
Drive
Rowdy
Born
Train
Glossy
Firsts
Across
Indistinguishable
First
Road
Muscle
Take
Behinds
Arrive
Life
Deep
Airplane
World
Behind
Muscles
Leave
Wherever

More quotes by 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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There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
Mary Oliver
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I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
Mary Oliver
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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Mary Oliver
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If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
Mary Oliver
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Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
Mary Oliver
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He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
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What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
Mary Oliver
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Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.
Mary Oliver
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This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
Mary Oliver
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Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
Mary Oliver
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And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?
Mary Oliver
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In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Mary Oliver
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And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.
Mary Oliver
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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
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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...Sometimes I dream that everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly, and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness- and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.
Mary Oliver
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Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Mary Oliver
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I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver
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And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.
Mary Oliver