Mary Oliver Quotes

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

Everything I do is a metaphor of the universal order.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

Language is memory and metaphor.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

There's a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don't know why that is. I don't have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

I always look for characters that will hopefully develop into a more powerful symbol.

You know the saying, don’t kill the messenger? Hold that thought really, really close to your hearts. (Hermes)

I don't like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

Man is symbolic to the sun. The sun is dealing with a ball of fire and didn't go out yet. Me being symbolic to the sun, that's what keeps me going, that's like my hunger. That's like my fury, my self esteem. That's the elements within me that keep my body motionable. The fire is self esteem. Inner strength.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.