• Upstream by Mary Oliver

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• "If this was lost, let us all be lost always."
• "Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. / Attention is the beginning of devotion."
• "But first and foremost, 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 and robust wordiness — wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak — to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed."
• "I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too."
• "[Young foxes] have neither mercy nor pity. They have one responsibility — to stay alive, if they can, and be foxes."
• "And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life."
• "How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?"
• "Occasionally a little blue heron, an adult bird, appears in the thick waters of summer, which stir fitfully under the spindles of its legs."
• "I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier."
• "All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself."
• "In the deepest sense, Poe was without confidence in a future that might be different from the past. He was, forever, reliving an inescapable, original woe."
• "What else can we say? What else can we know? That it was not a trivial loneliness, or a passing loneliness, or a body loneliness only, but a loneliness near fatal."
• "There is a rumor of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning."
• "He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not fact; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief."
• "And I search in the deeper woods, past fire roads and the bike trail, among the black oaks and the taller pines, in the silent blue afternoons, when the sand is still frozen and the snow falls slowly and aimlessly, and the whole world smells like water in an iron cup."
• "I know this bird. If it could, it would eat the whole world."
• "But it is not in the nature of crows to hide or cower — it is in their nature to gather and to screech and to gamble in the very tree where death stares at them with molten eyes."
• "Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer."
• "After Luke died, I crossed and recrossed the Province Lands, wherever we had been, and wherever I found her paw-prints in the sand I dragged branches and leaves and slabs of bark over them, so they would last, would keep from the wind a long time. Then, overnight, after maybe three weeks, in a dazzling, rearranging rain, they were gone."
• "Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves."
• "I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple."
• "It was pine I looked for, with its tawny pattern of rings, its crisp knots, its willingness to be broken, cut, split, and its fragrance that never reached the air but made the heart gasp with its sweetness."
• "In the woods, fallen branches of oak, of maple, of the dear, wind-worn pines. They lie on the ground and do nothing. They are travelers on the way to oblivion."
• "They do not recognize me as anything very different from this enfoldment of leaves, this wind-roarer, this wooden palace lying down, now, upon the earth, like anything heavy, and happy, and full of sunlight, and half asleep."

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• "Dear Bear, it's no use, the world is like that. So stay where you are, and live long. Someday maybe we'll wise up and remember what you were: hopeless ambassador of a world that returns now only in poets' dreams."