Quote

When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then. So I try not to miss anything. I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moon or the slipper of its coming back. Or, a kiss. Well, yes, especially a kiss.

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
Never
Full
Missed
Think
Happens
Kiss
Thinking
Anything
Miss
Life
Back
Kissing
Wells
Moon
Well
Missing
Whole
Especially
Slipper
Trying
Coming
Slippers

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
Mary Oliver
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Attention is the beginning of devotion.
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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Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver
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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.
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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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
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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It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Mary Oliver
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Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
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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A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Mary Oliver
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On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
Mary Oliver
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It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
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
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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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All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.
Mary Oliver
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Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open.
Mary Oliver
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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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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