Ellen Schecter > Ellen's Quotes

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

--from WHEN DEATH COMES”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”
― Mary Oliver

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”
― Mary Oliver

“there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”
― Mary Oliver

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

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”
― Mary Oliver

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
― Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

“Still, 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.”
― Mary Oliver

“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.”
― Mary Oliver

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2

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

“Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
― Mary Oliver

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

“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, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

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

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love