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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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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
World
Included
Soft
Pity
Walks
Littles
Little
Thing
Every
More quotes by Mary Oliver
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
Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver
How heron comes It is a negligence of the mind not to notice how at dusk heron comes to the pond and stands there in his death robes, perfect servant of the system, hungry, his eyes full of attention, his wings pure light
Mary Oliver
If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
Mary Oliver
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
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
The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.
Mary Oliver
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
I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
Mary Oliver
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
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
Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere I finally just stop and write.
Mary Oliver
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
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? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
Mary Oliver
maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--
Mary Oliver
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
Mary Oliver
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
