Mary Oliver Quotes About Darkness

Quotes about: Darkness

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

  Mary Oliver

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Mary Oliver (2006). “Thirst: Poems”, p.61, Beacon Press

• Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

  Mary Oliver

  Morning, Stars, Kindness

  Mary Oliver (2004). “Why I Wake Early: New Poems”, p.3, Beacon Press

• I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

  Mary Oliver

  Morning, Stars, Dark

  Mary Oliver (2017). “Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver”, p.368, Penguin

• maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--

  Mary Oliver

  Death, Light, Darkness

  Mary Oliver (2013). “New and Selected Poems, Volume One”, p.108, Beacon Press

• When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it’s going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body as a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. [from the poem "When Death Comes"]

  Mary Oliver

  Flower, Sisterhood, Thinking

  Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes”

• I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

  Mary Oliver

  Book, Night, Doors

  Mary Oliver (2016). “Upstream: Selected Essays”, p.15, Penguin

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