Quotes by Mary Oliver

And I say to my heart: rave on.

    Oh, good scholar,
        I say to myself,
            how can you help
 
but grow wise
    with such teachings
        as these -
            the untrimmable light
 
of the world,
    the ocean's shine,
        the prayers that are made
            out of grass?

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

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

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.

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.

The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?

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