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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
Nothing
Writing
Always
Poems
Write
Else
Wanted
More quotes by 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
It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
Mary Oliver
It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.
Mary Oliver
What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
Mary Oliver
We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.
Mary Oliver
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true for they are in another world altogether.
Mary Oliver
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
Mary Oliver
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Mary Oliver
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
Mary Oliver
The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
Mary Oliver
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
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
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Mary Oliver
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver
This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
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
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
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
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