## Metadata - Author: [[Mary Oliver]] - Full Title: Long Life - Category: #books ## Highlights - How light our bodies feel as we lounge against the planks and trail our hands in the water. Ahead is the sandy point of our destination, and between us and it not a single apportioning marker but the wide water’s drowsy lap and slide, its abundance and gleam. We stroll on its surface freely, citizens of the water world. How different from the foot on the stone, the hand opening the gate, the gravel path of the garden, the trudge through loose sand, the heel sticking into the clay of the field! Such weight, on the earth, is on our shoulders: gravity keeping us at home. But on the water we shake off the harness of weight; we glide; we are passengers of a sleek ocean bird with its single white wing filled with wind. ([Location 137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=137)) - THERE IS A RUMOR of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning. ([Location 253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=253)) - But dawn—dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me. ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=260)) - Man finds he has two halves to his existence: leisure and occupation, and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=277)) - And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one—the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself—is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed. ([Location 295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=295)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - For whatever reason, the heart cannot separate the world’s appearance and actions from morality and valor, and the power of every idea is intensified, if not actually created, by its expression in substance. Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity. ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=300)) - We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions—even to a certainty—as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee’s wings. ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=414)) - The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=518)) - Emerson would not turn from the world, which was domestic, and social, and collective, and required action. Neither would he swerve from that unperturbable inner radiance, mystical, forming no rational word but drenched with passionate and untranslatable song. A man should want to be domestic, steady, moral, politic, reasonable. He should want also to be subsumed, whirled, to know himself as dust in the fingers of the wind. ([Location 549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=549)) - it is no simple matter to be both inspirational and moderate. Emerson’s trick—I use the word in no belittling sense—was to fill his essays with “things” at the same time that his subject was conceptual, invisible, no more than a glimmer, but a glimmer of immeasurable sharpness inside the eye. So he attached the common word to the startling idea. “Hitch your wagon to a star,” he advised. “The drop is a small ocean.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” “Sleep lingers all our lifetime about the eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.” “The soul makes the body.” “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view,” he says, and suddenly that elite mystical practice seems clearer than ever before, and possible to each of us. ([Location 557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=557)) - The logicians have an incessant triumph over him, but their triumph is of no avail. He conquers minds, as well as hearts, wherever he goes; and without convincing anybody’s reason of any one thing, exalts their reason, and makes their minds worth more than they ever were before.” ([Location 579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=579)) - All his wildness was in his head—such a good place for it! Yet his certainty that thought, though it might grow most robust in the mind’s repose, was sent and meant for participation in the world, never altered, never ebbed. There are, for myself, a hundred reasons why I would find my life—not only my literary, thoughtful life but my emotional, responsive life—impoverished by Emerson’s absence, but none is greater than this uncloseting of thought into the world’s brilliant, perilous present. ([Location 586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0051QH31C&location=586))