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I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere I finally just stop and write.

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
Things
Stop
Wander
Time
Words
Anywhere
Write
Finally
Scribbling
Doe
Begin
Sauntering
Wells
Walking
Trekking
Well
Walk
Strolling
Writing
Journey
Notebook
Going
Walks
Hiking

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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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
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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
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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 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
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You must not ever stop being whimsical.
Mary Oliver
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A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them ... A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. . .
Mary Oliver
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
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It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Mary Oliver
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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.
Mary Oliver
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When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then. So I try not to miss anything. I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moon or the slipper of its coming back. Or, a kiss. Well, yes, especially a kiss.
Mary Oliver
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Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Mary Oliver
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If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
Mary Oliver
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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
Mary Oliver
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... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
Mary Oliver
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You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Mary Oliver
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To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
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And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?
Mary Oliver