Quote

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

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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
World
Offers
Crept
Poet
Mist
Went
Pale
High
Poets
Understand
Mountains
Comes
Wherever
Doe
China
Believe
Mountain
Busyness

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
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And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
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If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
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I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
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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.
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We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere there are many surprises yet to come.
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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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.
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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
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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.
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Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
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I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
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It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
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Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?
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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.
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Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
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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.
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I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
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As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
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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