Sharon Olds famous quotes

07-13-2025

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

#Writing #Lucky
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.
-- Sharon Olds

#Love You #Exercise #People
The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
-- Sharon Olds

#Mom #Daughter #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.
-- Sharon Olds

#Lying #Writing #Cake
Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.
-- Sharon Olds

#Baseball #Blow #World
The older I get, the more I feel
-- Sharon Olds

#Age #Feels
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.
-- Sharon Olds

#Mother #Daughter #Father
I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
-- Sharon Olds

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

#Thinking #Quality #Steps
I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But and I are savages.
-- Sharon Olds

#I Love You #Running #Savages
A family is a mystery.
-- Sharon Olds

#Mystery
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

#Pain #Children #Long
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.
-- Sharon Olds

#Country #May #Different
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.
-- Sharon Olds

#Writing #Feelings #Wish
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.
-- Sharon Olds

#World #Might
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

#Heart #Sides #Half
So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!
-- Sharon Olds

#Drinking #Coffee #Smoking
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

#Grandma #Laughing #Tin
... 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

#Dark #Curves #Pouring
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

#School #Someday #Notes
Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
-- Sharon Olds

#Persons
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.
-- Sharon Olds

#Notebook #Rocks #Asking
.. 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

#Love Is #Community #Bird
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.
-- Sharon Olds

#Vision #Crafts #Saws
Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
-- Sharon Olds

#Sex #Order #Risk

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