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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.

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
Toward
Roughest
Groups
Soften
Strange
Advocating
Wonderful
Accommodate
Give
Edges
Sometimes
Response
Giving
Group
Writing
Writers

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Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
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All eternity is in the moment.
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maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--
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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
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All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
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...Sometimes I dream that everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly, and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness- and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.
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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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I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.
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I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
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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.
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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
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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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The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
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We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.
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The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.
Mary Oliver
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Can one be passionate about the just, the ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit no labor in its cause? I don't think so. All summations have a beginning, all effect has a story, all kindness beings with the sown seed. Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action. Be ignited or be gone.
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A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
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Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again~ wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.
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