Sharon Olds Quotes

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

— 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

“I did not know him, I knew my idea
of him.”

— 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

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

— Sharon Olds

“It is
forbidden to love where we are not loved”

— Sharon Olds

“A family is a mystery.”

— 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

“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

“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 could
choose, a place to die,
it would never have been in your arms, old darling

— 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

“The liquor like fire in his hand”

— Sharon Olds

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

— 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

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

“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

“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

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

— 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

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

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— 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

“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 wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.”

— 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

“The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.”

— Sharon Olds

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

— 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

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— 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

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

“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

“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

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

— 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

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

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

— 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

“The older I get, the more I feel”

— 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

“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

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

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

— 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