But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the co… - Mary Oliver

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s 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.

"It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning — it'll be gone."

[Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver (O Magazine, March 2011)]

Be ignited, or be gone.