I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a deep appreciation for the beauty of nature and the overwhelming feelings it can evoke.
Mary Oliver's quote captures the essence of renewal and the emotional intensity that comes with the arrival of spring. The imagery of spring flowing over a starting point symbolizes new beginnings and the beauty of nature, while the feeling of potentially 'drowning' suggests an overwhelming connection to the vibrant life and beauty that spring represents, illustrating how deeply one can feel in response to the natural world.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the impact of nature on our emotions, you could use this quote to illustrate the profound connection we feel in spring.
More from Mary Oliver
All quotes →At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
Similar quotes
It's up to us as photographers to give voice to the natural world.
The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro.
The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.
The Earth is blue... how wonderful. It is amazing
Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work.
When I speak My lips feel cold - The autumn wind.