MARY OLIVER FRIENDSHIP QUOTES

“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.”

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

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

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

“Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.”

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.”

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

“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.”

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

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

“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.”

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable, beautiful, and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.” QUOTES FOR DAY START

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.”

“You don’t have to move mountains. Simply fall in love with life. Be a tornado of happiness, gratitude, and acceptance. You will change the world by just being a warm, kind-hearted human being.”

“Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”

“Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.”

“There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.”

“It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.”

“The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good.”

“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

“I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that.”

“And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?'”

“The heart within me has awakened—how long has it been asleep?”

“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.”