Mary Oliver Quotes

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

I don’t ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

Attention without feeling is only a report.

All eternity is in the moment.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.

It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena’s owl of wisdom and Merlin’s companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind.

What can we do about God, who makes and then breaks every god-forsaken, beautiful day?