Best 50 quotes of Sharon Olds on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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.

Every poet I know - although there may be some I don't know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don't teach - tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.

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

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.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

... 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.

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 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.

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.

The older I get, the more I feel.

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

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

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.

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

.. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Free Shoes The pairs of shoes stand in rows, polished and jet, like coffins for small pets, lined with off-white. Evacuated children sit in rows eyeing the pairs, child after child after child, no parents anywhere near. When it's their turn, they get a pair of new shoes and the old ones are taken away. Of course it is kind of the nice people to give them the shoes. Of course it is better to be here in the country, not there where the buildings explode and hurl down pieces of children. Of course, of course. This life that has been given them like a task! This life, this black bright narrow unbroken-in shoe.

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.

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it--she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don't do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it

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.

The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other. I do not know what he sees, but I see eyes of surpassing tenderness and calm, a calm like the dignity of matter. I love the open ocean blue-grey-green of his iris, I love the curve of it against the white, that curve the sight of what has caused me to come, when he’s quite still, deep inside me. I have never seen a curve like that, except the earth from outer space. I don’t know where he got his kindness without self-regard, almost without self, and yet he chose one woman, instead of the others. By knowing him, I get to know the purity of the animal which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing, his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry–there is no worry, no pity, no graver radiance. If we are on our backs, side by side, with our faces turned fully to face each other, I can hear a tear from my lower eye hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth, and then the upper eye’s tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people. I am so lucky that I can know him. This is the only way to know him. I am the only one who knows him. When I wake again, he is still looking at me, as if he is eternal. For an hour we wake and doze, and slowly I know that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other coming brought us to the edge of–we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, this place beyond the other places, beyond the body itself, we are making love.