Quote

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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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
Heart
Close
Every
Doors
Good
Walk
Thinking
Dead
Like
Walks
Morning
Around
Pond
Ever
Ponds

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What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
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Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
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Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
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Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
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I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.
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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.
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The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.
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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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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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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
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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.
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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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A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
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Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
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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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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
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...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
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