"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
More Mary Oliver quotes
"Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no l...
"Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, ...
"When it's over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I d...
"You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal...
"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;...
"I know many lives worth living.
"Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able...
"People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
"The Fourth Sign of The Zodiac (Part 3) by Mary OliverI know, you never intended to be in this world.But you’re in it all the same.So why not get start...
"I went down not long agoto the Mad River, under the willowsI knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call itwhat madness you will, there's a sickness...
"Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
"DogfishI wantedThe past to go away, I wantedTo leave it, like another country; I wantedMy life to close, and openLike a hinge, like a wing, like the p...
"Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as b...
"All night my heart makes its wayhowever it can over the rough groundof uncertainties, but only until nightmeets and then is overwhelmed bymorning, the...