Mary Oliver - Keep Quotes

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Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Mary Oliver
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

Mary Oliver
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

Mary Oliver
There are things you can't reach. But You can reach out to them, and all day long. The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god. And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier. I look; morning to night I am never done with looking. Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around As though with your arms open.

Mary Oliver
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say Look! and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from Mysteries, Yes)

Mary Oliver
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

Mary Oliver
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

Mary Oliver
And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.

Mary Oliver