„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 of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –over and over announcing your placein the family of things.“— Mary Oliver
„Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.“— Mary Oliver
„to live in this worldyou must be ableto do three thingsto love what is mortal;to hold itagainst your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go“— Mary OliverNew and Selected Poems, Vol. 1
„One day you finally knewwhat you had to do, and began,though the voices around youkept shoutingtheir bad advice --though the whole housebegan to trembleand you felt the old tugat your ankles."Mend my life!"each voice cried.But you didn't stop.You knew what you had to do,though the wind priedwith its stiff fingersat the very foundations,though their melancholywas terrible.It was already lateenough, and a wild night,and the road full of fallenbranches and stones.But little by little,as you left their voices behind,the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds,and there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own,that kept you companyas you strode deeper and deeperinto the world,determined to dothe only thing you could do --determined to savethe only life you could save.“— Mary Oliver
„I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.“— Mary Oliver
„You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.“— Mary OliverWild Geese
„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 don't want to wonderif I have made of my life something particular, and real.I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.“— Mary Oliver
„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.“— Mary OliverOwls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
„Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields... Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.“— Mary Oliver
„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.“— Mary Oliver
„I tell you thisto break your heart,by which I mean onlythat it break open and never close againto the rest of the world.“— Mary OliverNew and Selected Poems, Vol. 2
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