Mary Oliver Quotes
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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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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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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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Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
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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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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 have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
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To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
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My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness
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Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.
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Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.
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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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I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem.
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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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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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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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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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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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In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.