I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though … - Mary Oliver

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I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think — no, you will realize — that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.

bereavement loss love spirituality pain grief
English
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About Mary Oliver

Mary Jane Oliver (10 September 1935 – 17 January 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Mary Jane Oliver
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Additional quotes by Mary Oliver

This is, I think, what holiness is:

the natural world, where every moment is full
of the passion to keep moving.

Inside every mind there’s a hermit’s cave full of light,
full of snow, full of concentration.

I’ve knelt there, and so have you,
hanging on to what you love,

to what is lovely.

Mary Oliver, At the Lake
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I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door — a thousand opening doors! — past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.
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