Verified Quotes
Every quote on this page is verified against the named source work.
Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning American poet who spent decades walking the woods at dawn and made attention a form, gets quoted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. The 10 quotes below are different: each one is checked word for word against the cited work, starting with Wild Geese (Dream Work), not copied from aggregator sites that pass misattributions along. The source is named under every line, so you can trace each quote back to the page it came from.
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On deciding whether to finally quit and start over:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?Mary Oliver, The Summer Day (House of Light)
2 verified quotes
On forgiving yourself for not being perfect:
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.Mary Oliver, Wild Geese (Dream Work)
On feeling like you don't belong anywhere:
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 place in the family of things.Mary Oliver, Wild Geese (Dream Work)
1 verified quote
On showing love through paying closer attention:
Attention is the beginning of devotion.Mary Oliver, Upstream
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On finding purpose in an ordinary day:
Instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.Mary Oliver, Sometimes (Red Bird)
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On wanting to live fully before facing death:
When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.Mary Oliver, When Death Comes (New and Selected Poems)
On choosing a life that actually engages instead of just passing through:
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.Mary Oliver, When Death Comes (New and Selected Poems)
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On loving someone fully while knowing you will lose them:
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.Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods (American Primitive)
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On finding meaning in a painful relationship years later:
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, The Uses of Sorrow (Thirst)
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On leaving space for a future you cannot plan for:
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.Mary Oliver, Evidence