Upstream: Selected Essays

by Mary Oliver

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica.

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

I believe everything has a soul.

It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

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.

The most powerful and thought provoking quote I’ve read in such a long time.

we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.

Everything he learned, he learned at a careful pace—will

I was sick for activity.

I don’t know if I am heading toward heaven or that other, dark place, but I know I have already lived in heaven for fifty years. Thank you, Provincetown.