Long Life Quotes

“You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn — dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“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?”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“I walk in the world to love it.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life — that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change — there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, “There’s Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook.” But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless. I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“On the windless days, when the maples have put forth their deep canopies, and the sky is wearing its new blue immensities, and the wind has dusted itself not an hour ago in some spicy field and hardly touches us as it passes by, what is it we do? We lie down and rest upon the generous earth. Very likely we fall asleep.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“I read Jacob Boehme and am caught in his shining web. Here are Desire and Will that should be (he says) as two arms at one task; in my life they are less cooperative. Will keeps sliding away down the hill, to play when work is called for, and Desire piously wants to labor when the best season of merriment is around me. Troublemakers, both of them.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“THE DISTINCTION and particular value of anything, or any person, inevitably must alter according to the time and place from which we take our view.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“What would it be like to live one whole day as a Ruskin sentence, wandering like a creek with little comma bridges?”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“think of this every day. I think of it when I meet the turtle with its patient green face, or hear the hawk’s tin-tongued skittering cry, or watch the otters at play in the pond. I am blood and bone however that happened, but I am convictions of my singular experience and my own thought, and they are made greatly of the hours of the earth, rough or smooth, but never less than intimate, poetic, dreamy, adamant, ferocious, loving, life-shaping.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“Such weight, on the earth, is on our shoulders: gravity keeping us at home. But on the water we shake off the harness of weight; we glide; we are passengers of a sleek ocean bird with its single white wing filled with wind.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“All through our gliding journey, on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind. I say song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it -- not to have such music inside one's head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift I should bring to the world? What is the life I should live?”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions--even to a certainty--as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee's wings. This, too, I suggest, is the weather, and worthy of report.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“Nothing outside ourselves makes us desire to do so; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“In the shapeliness of a life, habit plays its sovereign role.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“What some might call the restrictions of the daily office they find to be an opportunity to foster the inner life.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic. M. will hardly look at a bush. She wants a speedboat; I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses. Years ago M. took flying lessons. In the afternoons I got to stand at the edge of the harbor and watch her stall the small plane over the water. That means you cut the engine and let the plane drop, nose first, down. Then you start the engine again, while the plane is dropping, and you level it, hopefully, and swoop away. Week after week M. came home looking the way I feel when I've seen wild swans. It was terrifying, and wonderful.
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its force. Prows flows forward bravely and, often, serenely, only slowly exposing emotion. Every character, every idea piques our interest, until the complexity of it is its asset; we begin to feel a whole culture under and behind it. Poems are less cautious, and the voice of the poem remains somehow solitary. And it is a flesh and bone voice, that slips and slides and leaps over the bank and out onto any river it meets, landing, with sharp blades, on the smallest piece of ice. Working on prose and working on poems elicit different paces from the heartbeat. One is nicer to feel than the other, guess which one. When I have spent a long time with prose I feel the weight of thee work. But when I work at poems, the word is in error; it isn't like any other labor. Poems either do not succeed, or they feel as much delivered as created.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings