Quote

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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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
Come
Harbor
Life
Harbors
World
River
Longing
Rivers
Lips
Imagination
Pond
Live
Ponds

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
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Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
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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.
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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
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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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You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
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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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A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
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I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.
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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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... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
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Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.
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Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.
Mary Oliver
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My work is loving the world.
Mary Oliver
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You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world — and there are plenty — very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.
Mary Oliver
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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
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I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
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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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Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver