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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.

Mary Oliver

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Mary Oliver
Age: 83 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: January 17
Climate Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maple Heights
Ohio
Mary Jane Oliver
Clutter
Going
Spiritually
Things
Curious
Material
Notion
Materials
Better
Cluttered
Many

More quotes by 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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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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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
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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've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Mary Oliver
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As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.
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...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
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And I say to my heart: rave on.
Mary Oliver
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You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver
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Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
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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In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
Mary Oliver
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
Mary Oliver
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Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver
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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
Mary Oliver
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There is only one question: / how to love this world.
Mary Oliver
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I know many lives worth living.
Mary Oliver
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This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
Mary Oliver