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

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A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
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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.
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I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
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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.
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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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Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
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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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The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.
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Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
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The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
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The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real
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I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere I finally just stop and write.
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On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
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What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
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Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
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