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The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.
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
Energy
Three
Ingredients
Curiosity
Mystery
Poetry
Spiritual
Universe
Language
More quotes by Mary Oliver
Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.
Mary Oliver
I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet I just get up and write.
Mary Oliver
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
And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?
Mary Oliver
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.
Mary Oliver
Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open.
Mary Oliver
Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Mary Oliver
After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Mary Oliver
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Mary Oliver
It's not a competition, it's a doorway.
Mary Oliver
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
...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.
Mary Oliver
I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Mary Oliver
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
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things
Mary Oliver
Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.
Mary Oliver
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
Mary Oliver
