"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
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Quote collection
Mary Oliver quotes (page 3 of 14)
280 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you."
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"Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it."
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"Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness."
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"When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included."
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"Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective."
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"Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise."
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"In your hands The dog, the donkey, surely they know They are alive. Who would argue otherwise? But now, after years of consideration, I am getting beyond that. What about the sunflowers? What about The tulips, and the pines? Listen, all you have to do is start and There’ll be no stopping. What about mountains? What about water Slipping over rocks? And speaking of stones, what about The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats So secret, so hidden it may take years Before, finally, you hear them?"
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"I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."
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"Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished."
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"He is exactly the poem I wanted to write."
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"I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better."
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"I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang."
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"Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives."
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"The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinking of sitting out on the sand to watch the moon rise. Full tonight. So we go and the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think about time and space, makes me take measure of myself: one iota pondering heaven. Thus we sit, I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How rich it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up into my face. As though I were his perfect moon."
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"Music: what so many sentences aspire to be."
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"Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going."
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"The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own."
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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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"Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone. When I'm alone I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much."
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