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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
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
Calling
Travel
Listen
Littles
Little
Life
Breathing
More quotes by Mary Oliver
I know many lives worth living.
Mary Oliver
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
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
Mary Oliver
Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Mary Oliver
Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
Mary Oliver
maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--
Mary Oliver
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
Mary Oliver
Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.
Mary Oliver
The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.
Mary Oliver
It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
Mary Oliver
Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly
Mary Oliver
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.
Mary Oliver
There are things you can’t reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open.
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
...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
