It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down.

— Mary Oliver

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning -- it'll be

— 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 was alive for a little while.

— Mary Oliver

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and openlike 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 wasalivefor a little while.

— Mary Oliver

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. Furthermore, I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

— Mary Oliver

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 is my story it will be common, though it is 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.

— Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago to the Mad River, under the willows knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it what madness you will, there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that'forgetting what we should never forget. Tecumseh lived here. The wounds of the pastier ignored, but hang online the litter that snags among the yellow branches, newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains. Where are the Shawnee now? Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington, and even then, whatever they said, would you believe it? Sometimes would like to paint my body red and go into the glittering snow to die. His name meant Shooting Star. From Mad River country north to the border he gathered the tribe sand armed them one more time. He vowed to keep Ohio, and it took hi mover twenty years to fail. After the bloody and final fighting, at the Thames, it was over, except his body could not be found, and you can do whatever you want with that, say his people came in the black leaves of the night and hauled him to a secret grave, or that he turned into a little boy again, and leaped into a birch canoe and went rowing home down the rivers. Anyway this much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it, he will still best angry.

— Mary Oliver

I would like people to remember of me, how inexhaustible was her mindfulness.

— Mary Oliver

Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.

— Mary Oliver

Last night the rain spoke to mellowly, saying, what joy to come falling out of the brisk cloud, to be happy again in a new wagon the earth! That’s what it Haidas it dropped, smelling of iron, and vanishedlike a dream of the ocean into the branches and the grass below. Then it was over. The sky cleared. I was standing under a tree. The tree was a tree with happy leaves, and I was myself, and there were stars in the sky that were also themselves at the momenta which moment my right handwash holding my left hand which was holding the tree which was filled with star sand the soft rain –imagine! Imagine! The long and wondrous journeys still to be ours.

— Mary Oliver