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Do you cherish your humble and silky life?

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
Life
Silky
Heaviness
Cherish
Humble

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.
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What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
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I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
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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.
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I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
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We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
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Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly
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The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery.
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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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I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.
Mary Oliver
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Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
Mary Oliver
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And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.
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It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
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Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
Mary Oliver
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The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
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On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
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If you have ever gone into the woods with me, I must love you very much.
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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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.
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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
Mary Oliver