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Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

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
Life
Days
Less
Wish
Speak
Emerson
Live
Examined
Must
Examine
Heart
Busy
Trying
Head

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
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I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast there the blue plums.
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Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
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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.
Mary Oliver
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It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
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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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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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Attention without feeling is only a report.
Mary Oliver
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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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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A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them ... A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. . .
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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
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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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
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