Quote

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

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
Poems
Write
Else
Wanted
Nothing
Writing
Always

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Mary Oliver
Image
He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
Image
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
Image
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
Mary Oliver
Image
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
Mary Oliver
Image
What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
Mary Oliver
Image
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
Mary Oliver
Image
...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
Image
The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
Mary Oliver
Image
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Mary Oliver
Image
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
Mary Oliver
Image
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver