"On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?"
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Mary Oliver quotes (page 5 of 14)
280 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms, thinking of nothing, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth; all day my body accepts what it is. In the dark creeks that run by there is this thick paw of my life darting among the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue."
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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."
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"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work."
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"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."
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"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."
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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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"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."
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"And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead / children out of the fields into the text / of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass."
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"Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance."
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"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."
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"Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter."
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"Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem."
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"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
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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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"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."
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"A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life."
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"Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?"
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"I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening."
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