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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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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
Done
Love
Loved
Learn
Easy
Didn
Come

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Mary Oliver
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For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Mary Oliver
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
Mary Oliver
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I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
Mary Oliver
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Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
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Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver
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There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
Mary Oliver
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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
Mary Oliver
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He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Mary Oliver
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Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Mary Oliver
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Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
Mary Oliver
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I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver
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I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere I finally just stop and write.
Mary Oliver
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As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
Mary Oliver
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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
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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One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.
Mary Oliver
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There is only one question: / how to love this world.
Mary Oliver