Sharon Olds Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The older I get, the more I feel.

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

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

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.

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

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.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

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.

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.

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

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

... 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.

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.

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.

A family is a mystery.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

...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.