Quote

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

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
Untidy
Natured
Exuberance
Good

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
Mary Oliver
Image
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
Mary Oliver
Image
Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
Mary Oliver
Image
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Mary Oliver
Image
The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
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
I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.
Mary Oliver
Image
We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
Mary Oliver
Image
Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
Image
Can one be passionate about the just, the ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit no labor in its cause? I don't think so. All summations have a beginning, all effect has a story, all kindness beings with the sown seed. Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action. Be ignited or be gone.
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
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
Image
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
Image
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Mary Oliver
Image
This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
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
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 try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
Mary Oliver
Image
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver
Image
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver