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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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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
Good
Loves
Love
Hundred
Walk
Repenting
Walks
Repent
Animal
Soft
Purpose
Knees
Inspirational
Desert
Body
Miles

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
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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
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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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... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
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For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Mary Oliver
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...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
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And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?
Mary Oliver
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I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.
Mary Oliver
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And now I understand something so frightening &wonderful- how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar.
Mary Oliver
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Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.
Mary Oliver
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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.
Mary Oliver
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Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
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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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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When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.
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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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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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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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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The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
Mary Oliver