Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
Mary Oliver
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
World
Material
Materials
Realizing
Alive
Child
Captivated
Reading
Nevertheless
Without
Poems
Children
Substance
More quotes by Mary Oliver
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Mary Oliver
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
Mary Oliver
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
When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
Mary Oliver
Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
Mary Oliver
It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
Mary Oliver
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
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
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
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver
After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
Mary Oliver
The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.
Mary Oliver
... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver
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
He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Mary Oliver
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
On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
Mary Oliver
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
