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Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
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
Life
Loved
Full
Dark
Understand
Boxes
Inspirational
Gift
Someone
Gave
Years
Darkness
Love
Took
More quotes by Mary Oliver
He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
Mary Oliver
It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
Mary Oliver
Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
Mary Oliver
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
Mary Oliver
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.
Mary Oliver
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
Mary Oliver
There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
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
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
Mary Oliver
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
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
As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.
Mary Oliver
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
Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly
Mary Oliver
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
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
Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.
Mary Oliver
On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
Mary Oliver
