For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.

Mary Oliver Upstream: Selected Essays
Also known as: Mary Jane Oliver
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

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Additional quotes by Mary Oliver

"I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines...

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

(from poem, "Five A.M. in the Pinewoods")"

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,

I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.