Mary Oliver Quotes

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you're okay with who you are or where you came from.

Love inevitably forces one to look at their own life, and that's either a good thing or a bad thing depending on what the person has going on or what they've experienced. The search for love and heartbreak is a fairly university condition and everybody will take away from it something different.

Love is still something I'm learning about.

Testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!

Every instance of heartbreak can teach us powerful lessons about creating the kind of love we really want.

I'm at a place in my life right now where I'm very happy, very content. I'm finally OK with the idea of who I love, who I want to be with.

The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.

I've been heartbroken. I've broken hearts. That's part of life, and its part of figuring out who you are so you can find the right partner.

Most of us fall in love with someone's persona and spend the next three to five years discovering who that person really is. If you can stay connected through that process of raw vulnerability, I think you have a shot at the prize of knowing and accepting another human being for who and what they really are after years of highs and lows.

I have stepped off the relationship scene to come to terms with myself. I have spent most of my adult life being 'someone's girlfriend', and now I am happy being single.

I've been in many relationships in my life and learned a lot from them, good and bad.

Most people have a harder time letting themselves love than finding someone to love them.

Relationships are beautiful, and it's wonderful to find someone you can spend time with and share your life with. But there's also a lot of pressure attached to that. And I think you can't be in a relationship until you have discovered yourself fully.

I love my parents. Coming out to them was sort of coming out to myself. I educated them, and I wanted our relationship to keep growing. I wanted them to be a part of my life still. I wanted to be able to share with them what I was going through.

Love myself I do. Not everything, but I love the good as well as the bad. I love my crazy lifestyle, and I love my hard discipline. I love my freedom of speech and the way my eyes get dark when I'm tired. I love that I have learned to trust people with my heart, even if it will get broken. I am proud of everything that I am and will become.

People are so fearful about opening themselves up. All you want to do is to be able to connect with other people. When you connect with other people, you connect with something in yourself. It makes you feel happy. And yet it's so scary - it makes people feel vulnerable and unsafe.

To be honest, relationships with the opposite sex are the most challenging things I've done. You lose your compass, gravity changes, you don't know what's up or down, you're trying to figure it out. You're trying to make everybody happy, including yourself, and it's just... it's humbled me.

My gratitude is great to my family and friends for accepting me as the person who they now know me to be and for letting me show them the possibilities of a life well lived.

I don't believe I've ever truly been in love because I don't believe that I've known myself well enough in the past to allow someone to love me.

Getting married and really digging in with another human being can point out your greatest strengths and your greatest weaknesses.

The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.

For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

When it comes to love, always be open. Because the second youre not pining after a boy, or a boyfriend, amazing love comes into your life.