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.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

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.

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.

.. 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The older I get, the more I feel.

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

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

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

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

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