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

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.
Mary Oliver
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If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Mary Oliver
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I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet I just get up and write.
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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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.
Mary Oliver
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And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.
Mary Oliver
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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.
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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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
Mary Oliver
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Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
Mary Oliver
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The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver
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I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
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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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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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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Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.
Mary Oliver
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The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.
Mary Oliver
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You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Mary Oliver