Mary Oliver Quotes

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.

I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world.

Tonight in your dreams you must look at your hands.

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

I always had an awful lot going on in my head, always telling myself stories, very vivid imagination.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going.

Yeah, at home it's all moonbeams and puppy-dog tails, so I guess I do have a darker side - and I like writing about it.

I've always kind of lived in my own world.

Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.

I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.

My mind is in another planet behind the blocks. Sometimes I'm up in the blocks, and I'm like, 'What am I doing here?' I'm just not trying to think too much.

I began [blogging] because I have this handicap - I can't figure out my life or see God clearly unless I untangle my life again with words.

A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form.

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.

Dreaming is to think by moonlight by the light of an inner moon.

Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

Sometimes... sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass... and we are you.

How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.

As small as a world as large as alone.

Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.

at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.