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So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
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
Praying
Flow
Judging
Outwards
Inward
Swim
Pray
More quotes by Mary Oliver
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver
It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
Mary Oliver
And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.
Mary Oliver
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.
Mary Oliver
We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.
Mary Oliver
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Mary Oliver
All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.
Mary Oliver
Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
...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
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.
Mary Oliver
Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Mary Oliver
Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly
Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Mary Oliver
Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
Mary Oliver
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
Mary Oliver
I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
Mary Oliver
When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
Mary Oliver
