Sharon Olds Quotes
-
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.
→ -
She'd crack A joke sharp as a tin lid Hot from the teeth of the can-opener, And cackle her crack-corn laugh.
→ -
it is forbidden to love where we are not loved
→ -
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.
→ -
... 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.
→ -
Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
→ -
I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
→ -
Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
→ -
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.
→ -
At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.
→ -
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
→ -
The older I get, the more I feel.
→ -
Seeing yourself as responsible for the quality of your relationship, as a prime mover in your life, I think is a bold, amazing step.
→ -
So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But and I are savages.
→ -
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.
→ -
There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.
→ -
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.
→ -
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.
→ -
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.
→ -
Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.
→ -
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.
→ -
Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
→ -
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.
→ -
.. 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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Sylvia Plath Poet -
Galway Kinnell Poet -
Rita Dove Poet -
Robert Frost Poet -
Robert Hass Poet -
Adrienne Rich Poet -
Natasha Trethewey Poet -
Mary Oliver Poet -
Anne Sexton Poet -
Philip Levine Poet -
Charles Simic Poet -
David Lehman Poet -
W. S. Merwin Poet -
Ted Kooser Poet -
Louise Glück Poet -
Yusef Komunyakaa Poet -
Walt Whitman Poet -
James Tate Poet -
Jorie Graham Poet -
Billy Collins Poet