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.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.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 placein the family of things.
beauty birds nature poetry shore woods

About This Quote

About Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver was a 20th-century American poet. Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and the National Book Award in 1992. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • Beauty — Appreciating aesthetics, grace, and the sublime
  • Nature — Appreciation for the natural world and our place within it
  • Poetry — The art of language, rhythm, and emotional expression

More quotes by Mary Oliver

“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
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“I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple -- or a green field -- a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing -- an artifact, a moment of seeml...”
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“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
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“Every springI hear the thrush singingin the glowing woodshe is only passing through.His voice is deep,then he lifts it until it seemsto fall from the sky.I am thrilled.I am grateful.Then, by the en...”
— Mary Oliver
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“I stood like Adam in his lonely gardenOn that first morning, shaken out of sleep,Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.”
— Mary Oliver
adam creation eden gift

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
— Mary Oliver
nature poets
View all quotes by Mary Oliver →

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