"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
"Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the faces of the tulipsand the nodding morning glories,and into the windows of, even, themis..."
"You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life."
"When it's over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don't want to wonderif I have made of my life somet..."
"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work."
"I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: a..."
"Last nightthe rainspoke to meslowly, saying, what joyto come fallingout of the brisk cloud, to be happy againin a new wayon the earth! That’s what it saidas it dropped, smelling of iron, and vanishedl..."
"It is better for the heart to break, than not to break."
"I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple -- or a green field -- a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing -- an artifact, a moment of seemly a..."
"Attention is the beginning of devotion."