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Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
Mary Oliver
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote suggests that music achieves what written language strives for: emotional expression and profound meaning.

Mary Oliver's quote highlights the power of music as an art form that transcends the limitations of words. While sentences serve to convey thoughts and ideas, music has an innate ability to evoke deep feelings and resonate with the human experience in ways that language alone often cannot.

Themes

MusicArtExpressionEmotionLanguage

In practice

Example use cases

A motivational speech about creativity could start with this quote.

More from Mary Oliver

I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
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At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
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I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
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For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
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If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
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Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
Mary OliverRead

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