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"This is what I have. The dull hangover of waiting, the blush of my heart on the damp grass,the flower-faced moon. A gull broods on the shore where a moment ago there were two. Softly my right hand fondles my left hand as though it were you."
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"There is nothing inherently painful about being cheated on."

"I Have Confidence in Love, And Most of the Time I doubt it."

"It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus' spreads out his sin."

"There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive."

"She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it."

"I lost my illusions in a black rain of bitterness - now what do you see in my eyes? How can you still love me? How can I be tender? ..."
Explore more quotes by Mary Oliver


"I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalive for a little while."


"Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?"


"I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think-no, you will realize-that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying."


"The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. Full tonight.So we goand the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit,I thinking how grateful I am for the moon's perfect beauty and also, oh! How richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up intomy face. As though I werehis perfect moon."


"Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together."


"Love, love, love, says Percy.And hurry as fast as you canalong the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.Then, go to sleep.Give up your body heat, your beating heart.Then, trust."


"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."


"Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness-and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees."


"How heron comesIt is a negligence of the mindnot to notice how at duskheron comes to the pond andstands there in his death robes, perfectservant of the system, hungry, his eyesfull of attention, his wingspure light."
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