"We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness."
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Mary Oliver quotes (page 8 of 14)
280 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--"
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"In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that."
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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."
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"You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world — and there are plenty — very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes."
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"Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine"
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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."
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"It's not a competition, it's a doorway."
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"It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over."
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"Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us a maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force."
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"Every spring I hear the thrush singing in the glowing woods he is only passing through. His voice is deep, then he lifts it until it seems to fall from the sky. I am thrilled. I am grateful. Then, by the end of morning, he's gone, nothing but silence out of the tree where he rested for a night. And this I find acceptable. Not enough is a poor life. But too much is, well, too much. Imagine Verdi or Mahler every day, all day. It would exhaust anyone."
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"Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems."
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"This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention."
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"It is better for the heart to break, than not to break."
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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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"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. When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
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"So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray."
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"Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?"
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"I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing."
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"I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it."
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