Margaret > Margaret's Quotes

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi , The Essential Rumi

“On the beach, at dawn:
Four small stones clearly
Hugging each other.

How many kinds of love
Might there be in the world,
And how many formations might they make

And who am I ever
To imagine I could know
Such a marvelous business?

When the sun broke
It poured willingly its light
Over the stones

That did not move, not at all,
Just as, to its always generous term,
It shed its light on me,

My own body that loves,
Equally, to hug another body.”
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

“yoga soul today. instant resonation.

Spring

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her –
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.”
― Mary Oliver

“The sweetness of dogs (fifteen)

What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. Full tonight.
So we go

and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit,

I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s
perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up into
my face. As though I were
his perfect moon.”
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

“Percy wakes me (fourteen)

Percy wakes me and I am not ready.
He has slept all night under the covers.
Now he’s eager for action: a walk, then breakfast.
So I hasten up. He is sitting on the kitchen counter
Where he is not supposed to be.
How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you
Needed me,
To wake me.
He thought he would a lecture and deeply
His eyes begin to shine.
He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.
He squirms and squeals: he has done something
That he needed
And now he hears that it is okay.
I scratch his ears. I turn him over
And touch him everywhere. He is
Wild with the okayness of it. Then we walk, then
He has breakfast, and he is happy.
This is a poem about Percy.
This is a poem about more than Percy.
Think about it.”
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“If there were a place that we didn't know of, and there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
what they never could bring to mastery here – the bold
exploits of their high-flying hearts,
their towers of pleasure, their ladders
that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
just on each other, trembling, - and could master all this,
before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:
Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,
forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
coins of happiness before the at last
genuinely smiling pair on the gratified carpet?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.
We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves.

Who's turned us round like this, so that we always,
do what we may, retain the attitude
of someone who's departing? Just as he,
on the last hill, that shows him all his valley
for the last time, will turn and stop and linger,
we live our lives, for ever taking leave.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”
― E.E. Cummings

“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.”
― e.e. cummings, 100 Selected Poems

“I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.”
― e.e. cummings

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...”
― e.e cummings

“Parting is all we know of Heaven,
and all we need of Hell.”
― Emily Dickenson

“I am nobody! Who are you? Are you a nobody, too?”
― Emily Dickinson