Mary Oliver Quotes

Our lives are full of all the genres. Fear and hope and sadness.

I'm filled with a new joy mixed with old grief.

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.

Our days and nights have sorrows woven with delights.

And remember, it's also very funny, because side by side with grief lies joy.

Let's say you have white milk and chocolate milk, and one of them is good emotions and one of them is bad emotions, and you pour both in: you're still going to fill up and run over.

My joy is as painful as my pain.

Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep for here There is such matter for all feelings: Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.

People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.

I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair. I hate the way you drive my car. I hate it when you stare. I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind. I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme. I hate it, I hate the way you're always right. I hate it when you lie. I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry. I hate it when you're not around, and the fact that you didn't call. But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.

I'm the happiest the saddest guy in the world can be.

She was feeling, thinking, trembling about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry.

I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.

To me, the human experience does involve a great deal of anguish. It's joyful, but it's bittersweet. I just think that's life.

His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion as the common inheritance of us all.

I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.

A flood of emotions rushes into me. Pain and anger. Sadness and pity. But most surprising of all, hope.

My brain said no. But my heart!

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

Ethan thought he was doing the right thing. He knew it was crazy. And he didn’t want to go, but he had to anyway. Ethan was like that. Even if he was dead. He saved the world, but he shattered mine. What now?