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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
As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.
Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Mary Oliver
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Mary Oliver
It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
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.
Mary Oliver
He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
Mary Oliver
Attention without feeling is only a report.
Mary Oliver
The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
Mary Oliver
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
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
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
Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?
Mary Oliver
... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.
Mary Oliver
Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
Mary Oliver
It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
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
All eternity is in the moment.
Mary Oliver
Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
Mary Oliver
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
Mary Oliver
