Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver
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Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some strengthening throb of amazement, some good, sweet, empathic ping and swell. Mary Oliver
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Happiness isn’t a town on a map, or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work ongoing. Mary Oliver
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Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. Mary Oliver
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I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. Mary Oliver
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The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely, as I can too. And so, no doubt can you, and you. Mary Oliver
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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
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If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it…It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty Let the path become where I choose to walk, and not otherwise established. Mary Oliver
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It’s very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
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Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us. Mary Oliver
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We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. Mary Oliver
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It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day. Mary Oliver
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A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life. Mary Oliver
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As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes, breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes, there are no rules. Mary Oliver
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The resurrection of the morning. The mystery of the night. The hummingbird’s wings. The excitement of thunder. The rainbow in the waterfall. Wild mustard, that rough blaze of the fields. Mary Oliver
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You can fool a lot of yourself, but you can’t fool the soul. Mary Oliver
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I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too. Mary Oliver
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Whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. Mary Oliver
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Maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you. Mary Oliver
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Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say, ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. Mary Oliver
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I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people, they exist, and that they dance. Mary Oliver
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Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed. Mary Oliver
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Therefore, dark past, I’m about to do it. I’m about to forgive you for everything. Mary Oliver
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When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included? Mary Oliver
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I held my breath, as we do sometimes, to stop time when something wonderful has touched us. Mary Oliver
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What’s magical sometimes has deeper roots than reason. Mary Oliver
Short Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
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The whirlwind of human behavior is not to be set aside. Mary Oliver
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It is better for the heart to break, than not to break. Mary Oliver
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The extraordinary is what art is about. Mary Oliver
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Listen, whatever you see and love—that’s where you are. Mary Oliver
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Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Mary Oliver
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Always, there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude. Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
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I simply do not distinguish between work and play. Mary Oliver
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You must never stop being whimsical. Mary Oliver
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All eternity is in the moment. Mary Oliver
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I know many lives worth living. Mary Oliver
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Attention is the beginning of devotion. Mary Oliver
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If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Mary Oliver
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I walk in the world to love it. Mary Oliver
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My life without you would be a place of parched and broken trees. Mary Oliver
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Listen—are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? Mary Oliver
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Invention hovers always a little above the rules. Mary Oliver
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Be ignited, or be gone. Mary Oliver
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We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it. Mary Oliver
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There is only one question—how to love this world. Mary Oliver
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Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives. Mary Oliver
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Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Mary Oliver
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There are as many worlds as there are imagineers. Mary Oliver
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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. Mary Oliver
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Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us. Mary Oliver
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The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us. Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver Quotes About Navigating Life
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Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Mary Oliver
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This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know—that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness. Mary Oliver
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Said the river, ‘Imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.’ Mary Oliver
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With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Mary Oliver
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Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Mary Oliver
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I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world. Mary Oliver
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May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe—tiny but useful. Mary Oliver
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You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it. Mary Oliver
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To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. Mary Oliver
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And now I understand something so frightening & wonderful- how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar. Mary Oliver
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Now, I am learning to rise above all that, learning the thin life, waking up simply to praise everything in this world that is strong and beautiful always. Mary Oliver
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The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny. Mary Oliver
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Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. Mary Oliver
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We are not wise, and not very often kind; and much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Mary Oliver
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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. Mary Oliver
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I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do. Mary Oliver
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Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing, and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang. Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
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You must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life. Mary Oliver
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What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude. Mary Oliver
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For some things, there are no wrong seasons—which is what I dream of for me. Mary Oliver
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Mary Oliver
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In the beginning, I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it. Before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. Mary Oliver
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Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. Mary Oliver
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The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own. Mary Oliver
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This isn’t a playground. This is earth, our heaven for a while. Mary Oliver
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I have given precedence to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods that hold you in the center of my world. And I say to my body, grow thinner still. And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song. And I say to my heart, rave on. Mary Oliver
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And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes. Mary Oliver
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I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything – other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned – that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion. Mary Oliver
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My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness. Mary Oliver
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Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Mary Oliver
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Things take the time they take. Don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine? Mary Oliver
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What we must do, I suppose, is to hope the world keeps its balance; what we are to do, however, with our hearts waiting and watching-truly I do not know. Mary Oliver
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There are things you can’t reach, but you can reach out to them, and all day long. Mary Oliver
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I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings. Mary Oliver
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I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive. Mary Oliver
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Here is an amazement—once, I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body, there was a delicious ease; and in every motion of the green earth, there was a hint of paradise. And now I am sixty years old, and it is the same. Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver Quotes about Aging and Moving On
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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? Mary Oliver
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I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness! Mary Oliver
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Maybe death isn’t darkness after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us. Mary Oliver
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Then I remember—death comes before the rolling away of the stone. What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness to believe only in what can be proven. Mary Oliver
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When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
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That time, I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying. I went closer, and I did not die. Mary Oliver
Life and Inspiration Quotes by Mary Oliver
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But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality. Mary Oliver
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All important ideas must include the trees, the mountains, and the rivers. To understand many things, you must reach out of your own condition. Mary Oliver
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Even the most solitudinous of us is communal by habit, and indeed by commitment to the bravest of our dreams, which is to make a moral world. Mary Oliver
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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 and want it back. Mary Oliver
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I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility. Mary Oliver
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Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness. Mary Oliver
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And that is just the point—how the world, moist and beautiful, calls each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning, ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’ Mary Oliver
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I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
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The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. Mary Oliver
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Over and over, in the butterfly, we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest, we see not the inert, but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity. Mary Oliver
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If I had another life, I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness. Mary Oliver
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So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life. Mary Oliver
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Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts, and certainly visible. Mary Oliver
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I have a little dog who likes to nap with me. He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck. He is sweeter than soap. He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace, which can’t even bark… Mary Oliver
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And did you feel it in your heart, how it pertained to everything? And have you finally figured out what beauty is for? And have you changed your life? Mary Oliver
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Three things to remember: As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes there are no rules. Mary Oliver
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It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning, in this broken world. Mary Oliver
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed. Mary Oliver
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The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. Mary Oliver
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I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things. Mary Oliver
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Sing if you can sing, and if not, still be musical inside yourself. Mary Oliver
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Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness. Mary Oliver
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What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs? Mary Oliver
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And to tell the truth, I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness. I don’t want to sell my life for money. I don’t even want to come in out of the rain. Mary Oliver
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Dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person about his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me. Mary Oliver
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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. Mary Oliver
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But I also say this—that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. Mary Oliver
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This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings, or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. Mary Oliver
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How could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness? Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver on Love and Friendship
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From the complications of loving you, I think there is no end or return. No answer, no coming out of it. Which is the only way to love, isn’t it? Mary Oliver
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Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust. Mary Oliver
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Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly. Mary Oliver
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So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Mary Oliver
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My life without you would be a place of parched and broken trees. Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
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There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled. Like telling someone you love them, or giving your money away—all of it. Mary Oliver
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Your heart is beating, isn’t it? You’re not in chains, are you? There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even possibly, your own. Mary Oliver
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Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving. Mary Oliver
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You have broken my heart. Just as well. Now, I am learning to rise above all that, learning the thin life. Mary Oliver
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So it is, if the heart devotes itself to love, there is not a single inch of emptiness. Mary Oliver
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Also, I wanted to be able to love, and we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Mary Oliver
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In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. Mary Oliver
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There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier? Mary Oliver
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To live in this world, you must be able to do three things—to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go. Mary Oliver
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So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you. Mary Oliver
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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Mary Oliver
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This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver on Writing
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Poetry is a life-cherishing force. 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. Yes indeed. Mary Oliver
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He is exactly the poem I wanted to write. Mary Oliver
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Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Mary Oliver
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Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. Mary Oliver
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The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. Mary Oliver
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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. Mary Oliver Quotes on Hope
Summary
Mary Oliver was an American poet known for her contemplative and lyrical works that often centered around nature and the natural world. Born in 1935 in Ohio, Oliver grew up in a tumultuous household, with a father who was abusive and an absent mother. Despite the challenges she faced in her childhood, Oliver found solace in the outdoors, often spending hours alone in the woods and fields around her home.
Oliver published her first collection of poetry, “No Voyage and Other Poems,” in 1963, but it was her fourth collection, “American Primitive,” published in 1983, that brought her widespread acclaim. The collection won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and established Oliver as one of the most important voices in American poetry.
Throughout her career, Oliver continued to explore themes of nature, spirituality, and the human condition. She often drew inspiration from her observations of the natural world, and her works reflected a deep reverence for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. Her poetry was also marked by a deep sense of spirituality, with many of her works exploring themes of faith, grace, and transcendence.
Despite her success as a poet, Oliver remained deeply private throughout her life. She lived in a small town in Massachusetts with her partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, and was known for her reclusive nature. Oliver was also famously protective of her work, rarely giving interviews or sharing insights into her creative process.
Oliver passed away in 2019 at the age of 83, leaving behind a rich legacy of works that continue to inspire and captivate readers around the world. Her poetry is celebrated for its clarity and simplicity, and for its ability to evoke a sense of wonder and awe in readers. In a world that can often feel chaotic and overwhelming, Oliver’s works offer a reminder of the beauty and grace that can be found in even the smallest moments of life.
Overall, Mary Oliver was a poet of great depth and sensitivity, whose works continue to resonate with readers today. Her poems offer a powerful reminder of the importance of connecting with the natural world, and of finding meaning and purpose in even the most difficult of circumstances.