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Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly

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
Slowly
Goes
Also
Able
Wanted
Love

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
Mary Oliver
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In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
Mary Oliver
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When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.
Mary Oliver
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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
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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
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And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.
Mary Oliver
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Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
Mary Oliver
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Mary Oliver
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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
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Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?
Mary Oliver
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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
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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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Attention without feeling is only a report.
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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With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
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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There is only one question: / how to love this world.
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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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
Mary Oliver
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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