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

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Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
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I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
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Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
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Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
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Poetry is a river many voices travel in it poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless each arrives in an historical context almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it--indeed the world's need of it--these never pass.
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There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
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You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
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You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
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But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.
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I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
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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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... Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
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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.
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Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
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You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
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As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
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Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.
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I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
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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.
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You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
Mary Oliver