Mary Oliver
American poet whose work — rooted in long contemplative walks through the woods and dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts — became one of the most beloved bodies of contemplative literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive in 1984 and the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems in 1992. Her two questions — 'What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?' and 'Are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?' — have become touchstones of contemporary spiritual life. Her work blends close-watching of the natural world with a deep contemplative attention that has been compared to Rilke, Whitman, and the great wisdom traditions she rarely named.
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Quotes by Mary Oliver
109 quotes“What I have learned so far: keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
“What I have learned so far: that the heart is not afraid.”
“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 the windswept oak. The pale-eyed swan. The blue heron's reedy nest. The hour of decay. The hour of return.”
“I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that.”
“To experience this world deeply is the gift of a lifetime.”
“And love is the heart's eternity. Love is what we are made of.”
“In the long run, we are all dead. So why hurry past the lilies?”
“Sometimes the soul must shake itself awake.”
“Wherever the green trees are, that is church.”
“Where there is the sound of the river, the soul leans in.”
“It is sweet to be loved. It is sweeter to love.”
“The world's bones are made of lilies and stars.”
“Do not bother to ask why love. The asking is the not-loving.”
“To live as though it matters. To love as though it lasts.”
“What I have learned: trust the deep impulse. The body knows.”
“Whatever it is, hold it close. Whatever it is, let it go.”
“Some things, like falling in love and dying, you really only get to do once.”
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