Sharon Olds Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Sharon Olds

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

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

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 ~ Sharon Olds

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 ~ 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

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

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

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

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. ~ 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

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

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

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

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. ~ Sharon Olds

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. ~ 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

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

it is
forbidden to love where we are not loved ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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 ~ 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

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown. ~ 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 was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to do this job well. And the time never came back. ~ Sharon Olds

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. ~ Sharon Olds

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. ~ 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'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. ~ 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

The older I get, the more I feel ~ Sharon Olds

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. ~ Sharon Olds

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

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

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Sharon Olds

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. ~ Sharon Olds

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. ~ Sharon Olds

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms. ~ Ann Romney

By the way, the next time you get your cholesterol checked, make a note of the season. Because sunlight converts cholesterol to vitamin D, cholesterol levels can be higher in winter months, when we continue to make and eat cholesterol but there's less sunlight available to convert it. ~ Sharon Moalem

When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I put on embarrassment in the same way I put on Liliya's dress. It clings to my skin. ~ Sharon Cameron

I'm New-"
"New? How blessed," he said. "There's nothing in this whole wide world that is better than a new person! ~ Sharon Creech

This idea that being youthful is the only thing that's beautiful or attractive simply isn't true. I don't want to be an 'ageless beauty.' I want to be a woman who is the best I can be at my age. ~ Sharon Stone

I love Sutton House in Clapton, a beautiful example of Tudor architecture. ~ Sharon Horgan

Is love the ultimate illusion? Or is it what it seems to be
the greatest transformation of all? (Glyrenden) ~ Sharon Shinn

When I was a girl
the books I read were by men.
~ Sharon Doubiago

The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we've perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic. ~ Sharon Salzberg

For compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are a response to anxiety. Suffused and overwhelmed by anxiety, we grab hold of any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control. ~ Sharon Begley

I was one of the first 18-year-olds in the United States elected to public office right after 18-year-olds got the right to vote back in the early '70s. I ran for the Board of Education. ~ Michael Moore

If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively. ~ Charles Darwin

As human beings, we're capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I grew up in the business since I was three years old so I've always kind of been in front of the camera and grew up in commercials and I knew that I wanted to do it no matter what, I just loved it. ~ Ashley Tisdale

Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortable as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether - to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteeen-year-olds you no doubt revile - there is a point to it all. ~ John Green

Many actresses do that kind of shoot when they are in their early 20s but I didn't think I had anything to worry about so I decided to go for it. I was very pleased with the results and it was also nice to surprise a few people. ~ Sharon Stone

As long as I'm needed. I'll be ready to serve. I look forward with optimism. We need the Jews here. Move to Israel! Move to Israel! ~ Ariel Sharon

I stood in the bay window at our house and I sang Away In A Manger. It was my first time on stage, but there was nobody watching. I just remember it was so natural and it was such a secret - like masturbating. I felt like I had to wait until everybody was gone. So I guess six years old would be my most important age, 'cause in that moment, I just knew what I wanted to do. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Don't be late to the theater. The opening scene is a goody. ~ Sharon Stone

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should. ~ Meg Rosoff

My wife, Sharon, and I started with nothing when we got married. I was driving a 1902 Pinto and eating off a card table. ~ Dave Ramsey

Compassion isn't morose; it's something replenishing and opening; that's why it makes us happy. ~ Sharon Salzberg

It felt like I'd been playing second-string football for a long time, when, suddenly, I was playing in the Super Bowl. Even when 'Basic Instinct' was a hit, I still felt like I was running with that ball toward the end zone. It took awhile for me to realize that I was already in the end zone with the ball down and the crowd screaming on its feet. ~ Sharon Stone

She should leave you. Or you shouldn't leave her. I haven't worked it out yet. But you shouldn't be apart. ~ Sharon Shinn

Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year olds. ~ Jojo Jensen

When I first got the news, I was devastated," Annie said. And then her chin tilted in a defiant gesture, as if daring him to begrudge her her fear. "Actually, I was scared out of my wits." Gabe heard the tremble in her voice, but he gave her no evidence ~ Sharon Sala

Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Everything in my environment is offering me feedback, if I will only listen. ~ Sharon Weil

When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer - if we take the time to stop and tune in. ~ Sharon Salzberg

And how is your head? Better?" he asked.
"Very much. Sometimes it hurts." Right now it was throbbing. "But every day I am much improved."
"Where did you hit it? Are you bruised?"
I put a hand to the back of my head, a little to the left, where I had landed with such jarring force. "Here," I said. "It's still a little tender."
And leaning forward, he touched my hair right where I had just laid my hand. Such was he glamour that attended him that I expected the ache to instantly melt away, healed by his royal caress. But in fact, I felt a sudden leap in my heart that made the pain briefly more intense. ~ Sharon Shinn

In reality, love is fluid; it's a verb, not a noun. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Animal welfare - yes. Animal rights - don't make me laugh. I'm not an animals rights activist. I certainly do not love animals. In fact, I secretly mistrust all four-legged / furry / two-winged / feathered / shelled ar scaly brothers and sisters. If I were them, I would by now be plotting ultimate revenge on a scale previously unknown to man. ... I stick to a vegan diet only for reasons of self-preservertion. Call it insurance. When the time of the great animal uprising comes, I may have a small chance of escaping ... ~ Sharon Dodua Otoo

We spend our lives searching for something we think we don't have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime & anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart ~ Sharon Salzberg

Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain. ~ Sharon Salzberg

If you just take it down to bare facts, the reason for living is the reason you make it. I mean the brain was made to create. ~ Sharon Tate

Ashes don't necessarily signify an end ~ Sharon M. Draper

To celebrate someone else's life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I just sit there. The morning started out like crystal, but the day has turned to broken glass. ~ Sharon M. Draper

I didn't write them a happy ending because 17-year-olds don't get endings.
They get beginnings. ~ Rainbow Rowell

Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings. ~ Sharon Salzberg

To forgive, we may need to open our minds to a fuller exploration of the context in which the events occurred, and feel compassion for the circumstances and everyone involved, starting with ourselves. ~ Sharon Salzberg

She was smiling as she leaned toward Reed, who stooped down to put his lips against her ear. He would tell her that he wanted to travel to Merendon, or Marring Cross or Cranfield, someplace far away and exotic. He was the sort of man whose wish altered every year.
He said in a voice that only she could hear: "I wish you were not my sister."
She pulled back and stared up at him. He smiled, his face just faintly touched with sadness, and tossed his true-love into the fire. ~ Sharon Shinn

It is taught, we too can be enlightened, every one of us. We can be completely freed from the bonds of limitation and conditioned confusion through our own endeavor, inspiration, effort and development. There is a path, and we can traverse it. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I can't talk. I can't walk. I can't feed myself or take myself to the bathroom. Big bummer. ~ Sharon M. Draper

Oh this young man has had a very trying rookie season, with the litigation, the notoriety, his subsequent deportation to Canada and that country's refusal to accept him, well, I guess that's more than most 21-year-olds can handle... Ogie Ogilthorpe! ~ Jim Carr