"The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention."
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Mary Oliver quotes (page 7 of 14)
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"GOING TO WALDEN It isn't very far as highways lie. I might be back by nightfall, having seen The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water. Friends argue that I might be wiser for it. They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: How dull we grow from hurrying here and there! Many have gone, and think me half a fool To miss a day away in the cool country. Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish, Going to Walden is not so easy a thing As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult Trick of living, and finding it where you are."
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"You must not ever stop being whimsical."
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"Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open."
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"Attention is the beginning of devotion."
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"...there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life you could save."
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"Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation"
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"Who knows what will happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning."
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"Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? / Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?"
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"And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain."
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"The sea is the most beautiful face in our universe."
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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."
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"You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about."
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"Invention hovers always a little above the rules."
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"Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)"
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"When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it’s going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body as a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. [from the poem "When Death Comes"]"
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"I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive."
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"Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives."
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"Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over."
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"Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?"
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