Mary Oliver Quotes

There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.\

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.

I think with all the odd jobs I ever had, there was some kind of enlightenment but, yes, a lot of pain and suffering that I don't want to relive.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.

It is by suffering that human beings become angels.

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.

To appreciate heaven well, it's good for a person to have some fifteen minutes of hell.

Anything that I undergo, I look at as redemptive suffering.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

I think that any time of great pain is a time of transformation, a fertile time to plant new seeds.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

Isn't it funny that God takes you and puts you through the unendurable, and then, at the moment you have just begun to understand it and have some wisdom, it ends?

After several different marriages and failures, my mom started turning to the Lord. So she brought us to church. We got involved with the youth programs, and I got on fire a couple months in, like, 'Wow, this feels good.' At 10 years old, you don't know. It felt good.

How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.

The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, suffering, and surrender.

Nothing will prepare you for singing the truth like about 35 years in the music business, financial troubles and a couple trips to jail, ... It will get you really humble and really truthful, and gets you ready to sing out about who and what saved you.

You think you're being broken but you're really being broken open...and that's where the healing happens, in those broken places...if you'll allow it.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

In meditation, once you are gone in, you are gone in. Then, even when you resurrect you are a totally different person. The old personality is nowhere to be found. You have to start your life again from abc. You have to learn everything with fresh eyes, with a totally new heart. That's why meditation creates fear.