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I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.

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
Hurrying
Leaning
Listening
Soul

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.
Mary Oliver
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It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
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In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Mary Oliver
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One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver
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... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.
Mary Oliver
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... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
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maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--
Mary Oliver
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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
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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
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... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver
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I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver
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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
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Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
Mary Oliver
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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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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
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Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
Mary Oliver
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What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
Mary Oliver
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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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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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The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
Mary Oliver