Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

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

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

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

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.

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

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

A family is a mystery.

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.

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.

each hour is a room of shame, and I am swimming, swimming, holding my head up, smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed, like being naked with the clothed, or being a child, having to try to behave while hating the terms of your life.

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.

let's part equals, as we were in every bed, pure equals of the earth

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.

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