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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.
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
Poetry
Something
Way
Make
Life
Basket
Baskets
Profession
Empty
More quotes by Mary Oliver
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.
Mary Oliver
Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
Mary Oliver
Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
Mary Oliver
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.
Mary Oliver
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
Mary Oliver
The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward it can give gifts or withhold all it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.
Mary Oliver
All eternity is in the moment.
Mary Oliver
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
Mary Oliver
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.
Mary Oliver
... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
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
Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.
Mary Oliver
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.
Mary Oliver
After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
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
I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.
Mary Oliver
