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Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

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
Wonderful
Way
World
Unexpectedly
Holds
Deeply
Serious

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
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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... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
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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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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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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If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
Mary Oliver
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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
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 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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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.
Mary Oliver
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There are things you can’t reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open.
Mary Oliver
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We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere there are many surprises yet to come.
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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As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.
Mary Oliver
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Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
Mary Oliver
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Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Mary Oliver
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When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Mary Oliver