Mary Oliver Quotes
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I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.
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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.
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Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn't amuse me. Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.
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I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.
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Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function - to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory to the world, that good teacher.
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I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
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I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.
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You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
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I simply do not distinguish between work and play.
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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, to let it go.
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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
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When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
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What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.
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I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
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You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
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So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
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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 - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
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To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
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I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.