Mary Oliver Quotes
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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I like books that are fat and full.
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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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I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
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Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
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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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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.
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then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that and the years before that you were not.
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I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
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Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
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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.
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I'd rather write about polar bears than people.
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I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
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What countries, what visitations, what pomp would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
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Among the swans there is none called the least, or the greatest.
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I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.
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You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul.
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There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.
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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.
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I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.
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I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.
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Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.