Sharon Olds Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The Relics"

I slipped them into my friend's palm  -  
the tiny crucifix, and dove,
from off my mother's pendant watch  -  
and I asked her to walk them up through the brush
toward timberline, and find a place
to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now,
she writes, "I walked up the canyon at dusk,
warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon,
came to an outcrop, above a steep
drop  -  far below, a seasonal
creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder
and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the
love in the world, and I sent the talismans
flying off the cliff. They were so small,
and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or
heard them land." My mother is where
I cannot find her, she is gone beyond
recall, she lies in her sterling shapes
light as the most weightless bone in the body, her
stirrup bone, which was ground up
and sown into the sea. I do not know
what a soul is, I think of it
as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she
is wild now with it, she touches and is
touched by no one knows  -  down, or
droppings of a common nighthawk,
root of bird's foot fern, antenna of
Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the
huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was
something deeply right about
the physical elements  -  atoms, and cells,
and marrow  -  of my mother's body,
when I was young, and now her deli

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes I can almost see around our heads,
like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.

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

The next day, I am almost afraid. Love? It was more like dragonflies in the sun, 100 degrees at noon, the ends of their abdomens stuck together.

I close my eyes when I remember. I hardly knew myself, like something twisting and twisting out of a chrysalis, enormous, without language, all head, all shut eyes, and the humming like madness, the way they writhe away, and do not leave, back, back, away, back. Did I know you?

No kiss, no tenderness - more like killing, death-grip holding to life, genitals like violent hands clasped tight barely moving, more like being closed in a great jaw and eaten, and the screaming.

I groan to remember it, and when we started to die, then I refuse to remember, the way a drunkard forgets.

After, you held my hands extremely hard as my body moved in shudders like the ferry when its axle is loosed past engagement, you kept me sealed exactly against you, our hairlines wet as the arc of a gateway after a cloudburst, you secured me in your arms till I slept - clasped, fragrant, buoyant, that was the morning after love.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 is
forbidden to love where we are not loved

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

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 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.

The older I get, the more I feel

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 h

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

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