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It's not a competition, it's a doorway.

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
Doorway
Doorways
Competition

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Mary Oliver
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There is only one question: / how to love this world.
Mary Oliver
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What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver
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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
Mary Oliver
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A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Mary Oliver
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We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.
Mary Oliver
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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
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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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So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
Mary Oliver
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I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
Mary Oliver
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The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
Mary Oliver
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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Mary Oliver
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Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
Mary Oliver
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When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
Mary Oliver
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...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
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... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver
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Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Mary Oliver
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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.
Mary Oliver