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You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.

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
Never
Travel
Opportunity
Going

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
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Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
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
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When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then. So I try not to miss anything. I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moon or the slipper of its coming back. Or, a kiss. Well, yes, especially a kiss.
Mary Oliver
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
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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What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
Mary Oliver
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A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Mary Oliver
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Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.
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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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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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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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
Mary Oliver
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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
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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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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We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
Mary Oliver
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It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
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