Mary Oliver Quotes

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, Tomorrow will be dying.

To venerate the simple days Which lead the seasons by, Needs but to remember That from you or I They may take the trifle Termed mortality!

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.

The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.

How odd to watch a mortal kindle / Then to dwindle day by day / Knowing their bright souls are tinder / And the wind will have its way

The flower fades and dies; but he who wears the flower has not to mourn for it for ever.

She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.

The rose that lives its little hour Is prized beyone the sculpted flower.

Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away.