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Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?

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
Half
Perfect
Stills
Coat
Young
Coats
Still
Torn
Boots
Longer

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
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... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Mary Oliver
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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
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.
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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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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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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
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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Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
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What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
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The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
Mary Oliver
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My work is loving the world.
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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I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
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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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
Mary Oliver
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You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
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