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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

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
Also
Believe
Prescribed
Mischief
Necessarily
Kindness
Singing
Especially

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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All eternity is in the moment.
Mary Oliver
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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
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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
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Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.
Mary Oliver
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I know death is the fascinating snake under the leaves, sliding and sliding I know the heart loves him too, can't turn away, can't break the spell. Everything wants to enter the slow thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone.
Mary Oliver
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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Mary Oliver
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Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
Mary Oliver
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Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
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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What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
Mary Oliver
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Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
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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I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
Mary Oliver
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Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.
Mary Oliver
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Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
Mary Oliver
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I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
Mary Oliver
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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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You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
Mary Oliver
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The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
Mary Oliver
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Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver