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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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
Wanted
Nothing
Writing
Always
Poems
Write
Else
More quotes by Mary Oliver
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
Mary Oliver
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
Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
All eternity is in the moment.
Mary Oliver
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Mary Oliver
Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Mary Oliver
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
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
I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
Mary Oliver
So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.
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
You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
Mary Oliver
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
maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--
Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Mary Oliver
... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
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
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Mary Oliver
...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver