Quote

All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing

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
Light
Ground
Uncertainties
Ever
Wait
Deepening
Heart
However
Meets
Way
Wind
Overwhelmed
Morning
Disappointed
Waiting
Uncertainty
Makes
Rough
Night
Sing
Easing

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
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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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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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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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.
Mary Oliver
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All eternity is in the moment.
Mary Oliver
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I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
Mary Oliver
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And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.
Mary Oliver
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The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward it can give gifts or withhold all it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.
Mary Oliver
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
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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Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Mary Oliver
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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
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I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
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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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.
Mary Oliver
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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?
Mary Oliver
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
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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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Mary Oliver