Quote

...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.

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
Things
Lonely
Like
Offers
World
Exciting
Announcing
Imagination
Geese
Family
Harsh
Nature
Whoever
Place
Calls
Matter
Wild

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
Mary Oliver
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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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.
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We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
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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
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I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet I just get up and write.
Mary Oliver
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It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver
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And I say to my heart: rave on.
Mary Oliver
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The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Mary Oliver
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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
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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I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.
Mary Oliver
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
Mary Oliver
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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