Sharon Olds Quotes & Sayings

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. — Sharon Olds

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother. — Sharon Olds

Let's part
equals, as we were in every bed, pure
equals of the earth — Sharon Olds

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

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

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors. — Sharon Olds

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

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

A family is a mystery. — Sharon Olds

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

The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful. — Sharon Olds

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

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

...the liquor like fire in his hand — Sharon Olds

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it. — Sharon Olds

I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on
talk, elegant and
honest, rational.
But and I are savages. — Sharon Olds

it is
forbidden to love where we are not loved — Sharon Olds

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

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

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

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

When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time. — Sharon Olds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate. — Sharon Olds

Once you lose someone it is never exactly
the same person who comes back. — Sharon Olds

I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think. — Sharon Olds

I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself. — Sharon Olds

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

And you couldn't say,
could you, that the touch you had from me
was other than the touch of one
who could love for life - whether we were suited
or not - for life, like a sentence. And now that I
consider, the touch that I had from you
became not the touch of the long view, but like the
tolerant willingness of one
who is passing through. — Sharon Olds

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

I've said that he and I had been crazy
for each other. But maybe my ex and I were not
crazy for each other. Maybe we
were sane for each other, as if our desire
was almost not even personal -
it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there
seemed to be no other woman
or man in the world. — Sharon Olds

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

...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

If I could
choose, a place to die,
it would never have been in your arms, old darling — Sharon Olds

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness. — Sharon Olds

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

I did not know him, I knew my idea
of him. — Sharon Olds

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

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

One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him. — Sharon Olds

The older I get, the more I feel — Sharon Olds

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

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown. — Sharon Olds

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

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me. — Sharon Olds

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

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking! — Sharon Olds

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

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force. — Sharon Olds

The End of World War One
Out of the scraped surface of the land
men began to emerge, like puppies
from the slit of their dam. Up from the trenches
they came out upon the pitted, raw earth
wobbling as if new-born.
They could not believe they would be allowed to live,
the orders had come down: no more killing.
They approached the enemy, holding out chocolate
and cigarettes. They shook hands, exchanged
souvenirs
mess-kits, neckerchiefs.
Some even embraced, while in London
total strangers copulated
in doorways and on the pavement, in the ecstasy
of being reprieved. Nine months later,
like men emerging from the trenches, first the head,
then the body, there were lifted, newborn, from these mothers,
the soldiers of World War Two. — Sharon Olds

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

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

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

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up. — Sharon Olds

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

Some people think I should
be over my ex by now - maybe
I thought I might have been over him more
by now. Maybe I'm half over who he
was, but not who I thought he was, and not
over the wound, sudden deathblow
as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core
of our life together. — Sharon Olds

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

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

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

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

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