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The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

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
Love
Poets
Challenge
Poet
Ones
Challenges
Keep
Time

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.
Mary Oliver
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There are things you can’t reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open.
Mary Oliver
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I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
Mary Oliver
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I know many lives worth living.
Mary Oliver
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Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Mary Oliver
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It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
Mary Oliver
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Also I wanted to be able to love And we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
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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I very much wished not to be noticed, and to be left alone, and I sort of succeeded.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver
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Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
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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We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver
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We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.
Mary Oliver
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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.
Mary Oliver