Mary Oliver

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue.

But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function —

to excite the viewers toward sublime thought.

Glory to the world, that good teacher.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

Among the swans there is none called the least,

or the greatest.

So every day

I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth

of the ideas of God,one of which was you.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.But I believe they have between them

some fervent and necessary arrangement.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that

and the years before that

you were not.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.