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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.

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
Better
Workshops
Might
Gathering
Feel
Poets
Sometimes
Worked
Feels
Poet
Great
Read
Kind
Social
Workshop
School
Privately

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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.
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And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.
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The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
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Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.
Mary Oliver
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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.
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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
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As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.
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Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.
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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I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
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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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There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
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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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Poetry is a river many voices travel in it poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless each arrives in an historical context almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.
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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver
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It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
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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