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Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?

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
Altogether
Ambition
Wisdom
Today
Without

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
Mary Oliver
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
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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Attention without feeling is only a report.
Mary Oliver
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maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--
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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The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
Mary Oliver
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...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
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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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
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What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
Mary Oliver
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Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
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I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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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.
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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After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.
Mary Oliver
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It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.
Mary Oliver
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And I say to my heart: rave on.
Mary Oliver
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One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.
Mary Oliver