Quote

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

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
Particulars
Poem
Language

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
Mary Oliver
Image
My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast there the blue plums.
Mary Oliver
Image
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Mary Oliver
Image
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver
Image
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
Image
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.
Mary Oliver
Image
You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Mary Oliver
Image
Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.
Mary Oliver
Image
And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
Mary Oliver
Image
My work is loving the world.
Mary Oliver
Image
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
Mary Oliver
Image
Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
Mary Oliver
Image
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
Mary Oliver
Image
I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
Mary Oliver