Quote

Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

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
Life
Silky
Heaviness
Cherish
Humble

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
Mary Oliver
Image
We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere there are many surprises yet to come.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
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
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
And I say to my heart: rave on.
Mary Oliver
Image
Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver
Image
...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
Image
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.
Mary Oliver
Image
The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.
Mary Oliver
Image
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
Image
It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
Image
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
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
And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?
Mary Oliver
Image
Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver