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Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.

— Mary Oliver House of Light (1990)

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More quotes by Mary Oliver

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

New and Selected Poems (1992)

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2005)

But also I say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness.

Blue Iris (2004)

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Blue Pastures (1995)

Among the swans there is none called the least,
or the greatest.

Evidence (2009)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mary Oliver (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.