Mary Oliver
American poet.
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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.
Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
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; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
I know many lives worth living.
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness
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.
You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful—how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.
But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
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