Mary Oliver Quotes

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? – Mary Oliver

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. – Mary Oliver

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time. – Mary Oliver

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. – Mary Oliver

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

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. – Mary Oliver

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings. – Mary Oliver

The journey is a transformational one. I cannot predict how it will end, but I know that I will be changed along the way. – Mary Oliver

Do you love this world? – Mary Oliver

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. – Mary Oliver

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. – Mary Oliver

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. – Mary Oliver

The world’s a more beautiful place than we will ever be able to use. – Mary Oliver

The most important thing is to be aware of how beautiful life is, even in the most difficult moments. – Mary Oliver

Instructions for living a life: Listen. Be curious. Look again. – Mary Oliver

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, dark and light. – Mary Oliver

The world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting. – Mary Oliver

Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again. – Mary Oliver

When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. – Mary Oliver

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed. – Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. – Mary Oliver

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. – Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. – Mary Oliver

In black water depths, the turtle’s bones think shut. Season of places going grave. Eyes rising above the surface like airy bulbs. – Mary Oliver

Wild geese fly toward dusk, we go with them, hopping into millions of bodies. – Mary Oliver

Each morning I wake to the enamel bells of the world and I arrive. – Mary Oliver

Be still, my soul, and listen to the stones. We are the lucky ones. – Mary Oliver

Once I climbed the dunes on the edge of the ocean and the world opened before me like a perpetual dawn. – Mary Oliver

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? – Mary Oliver

In this world the normal thing is to be alive. – Mary Oliver

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. – Mary Oliver

Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life? – Mary Oliver

I don’t know how people survive the world without beauty. – Mary Oliver

Have I not taken this journey long enough to see the convergence of the many paths? – Mary Oliver

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. – Mary Oliver

The tall enameled sweet flowers were blooming, bringing notes of joy to the air as high as the puffy clouds in an otherwise cloudless sky. – Mary Oliver

What kind of life is this? And who could bear it without wonder? – Mary Oliver

I have learned not to underestimate the power of a single blade of grass. – Mary Oliver

To be looking at the earth for evidence and to be looking at the heavens for validation, this is how I live. – Mary Oliver

I will be the happiest woman in the world. I am grateful every day for my one wild and precious life. – Mary Oliver

Not to notice the joy of your own life is to miss it. – Mary Oliver

I’m in love with this world, this everyday world. – Mary Oliver

You must learn one thing: the world was made to be free in. – Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore, my mother standing with her back to me, but I know by the way her head moves that she is listening for the birds. – Mary Oliver

This morning the beautiful white heron was floating along above the water and then into the sky of this the one world we all belong to. – Mary Oliver

What I loved in the writing was a chance to remember all the walks I had taken with my dogs, all the rivers I had seen, everything I had seen. – Mary Oliver

I believe you’re as wise as the collective tree. – Mary Oliver

This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness. – Mary Oliver

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: know how 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

I don’t want to miss anything on this earth while I am here. – Mary Oliver