Poetry Quote by Mary Oliver — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“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.”

“I Worried”

“As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious”

“to live in this world”

“If you’re John Muir you want trees to”

“Another morning and I wake with thirst”

“Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,”

“Your daughter is ugly.”

“I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.”

“We the mortals touch the metals,”

“When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.”

“His head propped on a stack of poetry books he’d brought from the library. Almost all of them had been inscribed on the inside cover by a James Herondale, who had neatly written out his favorite lines.”