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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

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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
Creative
Reckless
Social
Absent
Another
Altogether
True
Minded
World
Customs
People
Obligation
Hopefully
Heedless
Notion
Obligations

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Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over.
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Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.
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This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
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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.
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Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
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As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.
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...Sometimes I dream that everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly, and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness- and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.
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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.
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Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.
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Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.
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Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
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We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere there are many surprises yet to come.
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Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
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Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
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People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
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Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
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Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
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In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
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All night my heart makes its way however it can over the rough ground of uncertainties, but only until night meets and then is overwhelmed by morning, the light deepening, the wind easing and just waiting, as I too wait (and when have I ever been disappointed?) for redbird to sing
Mary Oliver