Quotes
-
-
-
I believe you did not have a happy life. I believe you were cheated. I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery. I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression. I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling. I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger. I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all. I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness. I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the...
Mary Oliver
And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly...
Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case....
Mary Oliver
At Blackwater Pond"Look, the treesare turningtheir own bodiesinto pillarsof light, are giving off the richfragrance of cinnamonand fulfillment, the long tapersof cattailsare bursting and floating away overthe blue shouldersof the ponds, and every pond, no matter what itsname is, isnameless now. Every yeareverything. I have ever learnedin my lifetimeleads back to this: the firesand the black river of losswhose other sideis salvation, whose meaningnone of us will ever know. To live in this...
Mary Oliver
Mornings at Blackwater"For years, every morning, I drankfrom Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged mefrom the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say isthat the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capableof choosing what that will be, darling citizen. 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 liveyour...
Mary Oliver
When death comes….
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what it’s going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body as...
Mary Oliver
And there you are
on the shore,
fitful and thoughtful, trying
to attach them to an idea —
some news of your own life.
But the lilies
are slippery and wild—they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepest
spurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you.
Mary Oliver
Popular Author
Related Authors
-
Amiri Baraka Poet -
CA
Carol Ann Duffy Poet
-
Ezra Pound Poet -
JC
John Cleveland Poet
-
Jupiter Hammon Poet -
Paul Engle Poet -
RB
Robert Bly Poet
-
RD
Ruben Dario Poet
-
Shel Silverstein Poet -
WS
William Stafford Poet