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Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

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
Anyone
Hours
Lasts
Task
Last
Lovely
Anything
Tasks
Years
Century
Love
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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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Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Mary Oliver
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...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
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I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.
Mary Oliver
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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
Mary Oliver
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Every word is a messenger. Some have wings some are filled with fire some are filled with death.
Mary Oliver
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Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
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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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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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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It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
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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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. . .
Mary Oliver
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Can one be passionate about the just, the ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit no labor in its cause? I don't think so. All summations have a beginning, all effect has a story, all kindness beings with the sown seed. Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action. Be ignited or be gone.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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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.
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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Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.
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
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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