Quote

We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.

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
Deeply
Story
Stories
Anything
Love

More quotes by 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
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.
Mary Oliver
Image
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver
Image
I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
Mary Oliver
Image
What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
Mary Oliver
Image
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
Mary Oliver
Image
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
Image
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Mary Oliver
Image
If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
Mary Oliver
Image
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
Mary Oliver
Image
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
Image
He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
Image
You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world — and there are plenty — very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.
Mary Oliver
Image
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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
There is only one question: / how to love this world.
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
Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Mary Oliver