Sharon Olds Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I have heard about the civilized,the marriages run ontalk, elegant andhonest, rational.But and I are savages.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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