Mary Oliver Quotes
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I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.
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I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
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I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
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Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.
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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.
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The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
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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. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down.
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If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
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To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
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There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
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My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness
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One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
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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.
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As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
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I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.
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I don't know what God is. I don't know what death is. But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.
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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.
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Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day - which is what I did.
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In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.