Sharon Olds Quotes

#1. ...the liquor like fire in his hand

Sharon Olds

#2. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

Sharon Olds

#3. At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.

Sharon Olds

#4. Each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.

Sharon Olds

#5. Let's part
equals, as we were in every bed, pure
equals of the earth

Sharon Olds

#6. My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

Sharon Olds

#7. I want to relearn the intervals, to
journey with a man among the thirds and fifths,
augumented, diminshed, with a light touch,
sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual
adores and dotes - and of course what I reaaly
want is some low notes.

Sharon Olds

#8. I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.

Sharon Olds

#9. To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done.

Sharon Olds

#10. It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it.

Sharon Olds

#11. This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

Sharon Olds

#12. Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

Sharon Olds

#13. I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Sharon Olds

#14. Where have I
been while this person is leading my life
with her patience, will and order? In the garden;
on the bee and under the bee; in the
crown gathering cumulus and
flensing it from the boughs

Sharon Olds

#15. He fell in love with her because I
didn't suit him anymore -
nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he
saw it for me.

Sharon Olds

#16. I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a ... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.

Sharon Olds

#17. Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

Sharon Olds

#18. After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like a map, laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York

Sharon Olds

#19. I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

Sharon Olds

#20. Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

Sharon Olds

#21. The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

Sharon Olds

#22. Like the death of a crone in one twin bed as a child is born in the other. Have faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.

Sharon Olds

#23. A family is a mystery.

Sharon Olds

#24. If I could
choose, a place to die,
it would never have been in your arms, old darling

Sharon Olds

#25. Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

Sharon Olds

#26. I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it,
then I lay down on my father's grave.

Sharon Olds

#27. I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.

Sharon Olds

#28. Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

Sharon Olds

#29. I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.

Sharon Olds

#30. As if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness.

Sharon Olds

#31. Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.

Sharon Olds

#32. The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.

Sharon Olds

#33. I was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to do this job well. And the time never came back.

Sharon Olds

#34. The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Sharon Olds

#35. There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

Sharon Olds

#36. Once you lose someone it is never exactly
the same person who comes back.

Sharon Olds

#37. I have never thought I could take it, not even
for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,
to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a
long line
of women
who put themselves
first.

Sharon Olds

#38. There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.

Sharon Olds

#39. I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

Sharon Olds

#40. The older I get, the more I feel

Sharon Olds

#41. Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

Sharon Olds

#42. The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

Sharon Olds

#43. Sometimes I can feel it, the way we are
pouring slowly toward a curve and around it
through something dark and soft, and we are bound to
each other.

Sharon Olds

#44. She'd crack A joke sharp as a tin lid Hot from the teeth of the can-opener, And cackle her crack-corn laugh.

Sharon Olds

#45. Seeing yourself as responsible for the quality of your relationship, as a prime mover in your life, I think is a bold, amazing step.

Sharon Olds

#46. So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!

Sharon Olds

#47. I did not know him, I knew my idea
of him.

Sharon Olds

#48. When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.

Sharon Olds

#49. One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.

Sharon Olds

#50. When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.

Sharon Olds

#51. How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin?

Sharon Olds

#52. Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.

Sharon Olds

#53. Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.

Sharon Olds

#54. We're all taking on too much, we're all asking too much of ourselves. We're all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more.

Sharon Olds

#55. I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on
talk, elegant and
honest, rational.
But and I are savages.

Sharon Olds

#56. I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

Sharon Olds

#57. If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

Sharon Olds

#58. Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

Sharon Olds

#59. The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.

Sharon Olds

#60. I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.

Sharon Olds

#61. I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

Sharon Olds

#62. There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All,
Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small;
A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent,
And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.

Sharon Olds

#63. ...when I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breath's time, but for the long continuance, the hard candies of femur and stone, the fastnesses.

Sharon Olds

#64. Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Sharon Olds

#65. it is
forbidden to love where we are not loved

Sharon Olds

#66. Sometimes I can almost see around our heads,
like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.

Sharon Olds

#67. To a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

Sharon Olds