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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

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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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.
Mary Oliver
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Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Mary Oliver
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The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward it can give gifts or withhold all it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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So every day So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.
Mary Oliver
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Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Mary Oliver
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Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
Mary Oliver
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With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
Mary Oliver
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... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.
Mary Oliver
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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
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Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.
Mary Oliver
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I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
Mary Oliver
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Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
Mary Oliver
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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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One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver
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You must not ever stop being whimsical.
Mary Oliver
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All eternity is in the moment.
Mary Oliver
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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.
Mary Oliver
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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
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And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Mary Oliver