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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

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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
Working
Life
Hours
Read
Times
Easy
Clams
Beach
Book
Okay
Years
Outside
Good

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
Mary Oliver
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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
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You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver
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And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real
Mary Oliver
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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
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Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
Mary Oliver
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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
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I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver
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I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
Mary Oliver
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
Mary Oliver
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I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
Mary Oliver
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
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... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.
Mary Oliver
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A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them ... A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. . .
Mary Oliver
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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
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Mary Oliver
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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
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Attention without feeling is only a report.
Mary Oliver
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It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Mary Oliver
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I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.
Mary Oliver