Mary Oliver Quotes

However and wherever we are, we must live as if we will never die.

some men never die and some men never live but we're all alive tonight.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live.

There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.

We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.

Whether by a Mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs, death happens. But life isn't really just about avoiding death, is it? It's about living.

I've come to believe that whoever I am didn't start on December 14, 1946, and isn't going to end on whatever that mysterious date is in the future.

Live, so you do not have to look back and say: 'God, how I have wasted my life.'

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

If I didn't love the hourglass, I wouldn't love myself.

Isn't it odd that you have to keep proving you're alive?

Things can be really empty in this world, and I don't just mean the music world. It can become a very meaningless place if you don't really understand: 'who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?' To feel fulfilment and have a deeper level of understanding, personally, that is the most important thing.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

There's no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything.

Life's too short.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.

Have an earnestness for death and you will have life.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I tell myself to hurry up, that I have to do everything before death catches me.

I don’t think of dying, I think of being here now.

I've always asked myself since I was young, what is my duty on this planet? What am I there for? Just to hang around? Everybody must have some purpose.