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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
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Exactitude
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Muscle
Muscles
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More quotes by Mary Oliver
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver
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
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
There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
Mary Oliver
Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
Mary Oliver
... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly
Mary Oliver
I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Mary Oliver
And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.
Mary Oliver
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
Mary Oliver
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver
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
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Mary Oliver
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
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.
Mary Oliver
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
