Mary Oliver Quotes

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

Life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour.

I'm a full-of-contradictions kind of guy.

Life is like the ocean, it goes up and down.

I'm a nice guy, but not all the time. There are these personalities in me, so many of them. They come out at strange times. I can be one way, then five minutes later I'm another way.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.

You are now In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more. Yet in its depth what treasures!

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn

Lightning is like an elementary spirit, eccentric or rational, clever or silly, passing from one extreme to the other.

Where I come from Nobody knows; And where I'm going Everything goes. The wind blows, The sea flows - And nobody knows.

The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue, the fresh, the ever free! Without a mark, without a bound, It runneth the earth's wide regions round; It plays with the clouds; it mocks the skies; Or like a cradled creature lies.

Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?

I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - such a strange melange of good and evil.

People are weird. We do live on all levels at the same time and you can be fighting and flirting, and there can be fury and sexual tension. All that stuff can co-exist so it's just a testament to how complex we are. Or maybe it's a testament to how boringly we try and simplify everything.

The sea can swallow ships, and it can spit out whales like watermelon seeds. It will take what it wants, and it will keep what it has taken, and you may not take away from it what it does not wish to give.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.

I have things that are strident and confrontational, and I have a lot of things that are childlike and innocent and sort of sweet. So, somewhere in between lies the middle of me.

...What is more like love than the ocean? You can play in it, drown in it...it can be clear and bright enough to hurt your eyes, or covered in fog, hidden behind a curve of roads and then suddenly there in full glory. It's waves come like breaths, in and out, body stretched to forever in it's possibilities, and yet it's heart lies deep, not fully knowable, inconceivably majestic.

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

He who serves a revolution ploughs a sea.

[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.