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"A carpenter is hired- a roof repaired, a porch built. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Everyday we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes."
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"The answers to your problems lie all around you. The keys to your self-discovery are waiting to be found in each sunset, each pair of eyes, each breath of fresh air. Listen to the symphony of life and you will hear yourself. Find the beauty of nature and you have found your soul."
"People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it."
"It's strange to see people you don't know well in the morning, with sleepy eyes and pillow creases in their cheeks."
"I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn't squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn't even blink."
"The whole of the world could be deduced from the smallest grain of sand, if one studied it closely enough."
"Most people spend less time outside than prisoners."
"The Republic's most wanted criminal is just a boy, sitting before me, suddenly vulnerable, laying all his weaknesses out for me to see."
"I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too."
"Snap your fingerstop the world - rain falls harder."
"His eyes said what I cannot see."
Explore more quotes by Mary Oliver
"And now you'll be telling storiesof my coming backand they won't be false, and they won't be truebut they'll be real."
"How heron comesIt is a negligence of the mindnot to notice how at duskheron comes to the pond andstands there in his death robes, perfectservant of the system, hungry, his eyesfull of attention, his wingspure light."
"You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life."
"So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life."
"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."
"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."
"Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving."
"Why I Wake Early Hello, sun in my face.Hello, you who made the morningand spread it over the fieldsand into the faces of the tulipsand the nodding morning glories,and into the windows of, even, themiserable and the crotchety " best preacher that ever was,dear star, that just happensto be where you are in the universeto keep us from ever-darkness,to ease us with warm touching,to hold us in the great hands of light "good morning, good morning, good morning.Watch, now, how I start the dayin happiness, in kindness."
"Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness-and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees."
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