Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Quotations by:
Oliver, Mary
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?” West Wind (1997)
(Source)
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“In Blackwater Woods,” American Primitive (1983)
(Source)
Originally published in Yankee Magazine.
… believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“Invitation,” Red Bird: Poems (2008)
(Source)
On goldfinches singing.
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 to it neither power nor time.
But also I say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
And now I understand
something so frightening, and wonderful —
how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing
through crossroads, sticking
like lint to the familiar.
And now I understand
something so frightening, and wonderful —
how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing
through crossroads, sticking
like lint to the familiar.
You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
As a carpenter can make a gibbet as well as an altar, a writer can describe the world as trivial or exquisite, as material or as idea, as senseless or as purposeful. Words are wood.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
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.
And now you’ll be telling stories
of my coming back
and they won’t be false, and they won’t be true,
but they’ll be real.Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“The First Time Percy Came Back,” A Thousand Mornings (2012)
(Source)
You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“The Poet With His Face in His Hands,” New Yorker (4 Apr 2005)
(Source)
Collected in New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2 (2005), and The Best American Poetry, 2006.
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“The Summer Day,” New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (1992)
As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules.Sometimes there are no rules.
When it’s over I want to say: All my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
“When Death Comes” New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2 (2005)
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.
The universe could have been created ugly, and would have functioned. And yet there is beauty everywhere in creation. Beauty gives us an ache, to be worthy of that creation.
Mary Oliver (1935-2019) American poet
Comments at Wellesley College (20 Oct 2010)
(Source)
The last phrase is frequently paraphrased, "We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it."
