Quotes from Sharon Olds

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.

as if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness.

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

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.

the liquor like fire in his hand

I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it, then I lay down on my father's grave.

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.

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

I've said that he and I had been crazy for each other. But maybe my ex and I were not crazy for each other. Maybe we were sane for each other, as if our desire was almost not even personal - it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there seemed to be no other woman or man in the world.

Sometimes I can almost see around our heads, like gnats around a streetlight in summer, The children we could have, The glimmer of them.

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.

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

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.

When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.

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

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am paying attention to small beauties, whatever I have-as if it were our duty to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

I want to relearn the intervals, to journey with a man among the thirds and fifths, augumented, diminshed, with a light touch, sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual adores and dotes - and of course what I reaaly want is some low notes.

And sometimes I feel as if, already, I am not here—

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?

and my job is to eat the whole car of my anger, part by part, some parts ground down to steel-dust.

What was arousing, to me, for three decades, was faithfulness, the chains of orgasms extreme beyond violent in safety.

In his gaze, rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog- emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow: he was in there somewhere, I looked for him, and he gave me the gift, he let me in, knowing he would never once, in this world or in any other, have to do it again, and I saw him, not as he really was, I was still without the strength of anger, but I saw him see me, even now that dropping down into trust's affection in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet, and I said, Good-bye, and he said Good-bye

Minute by minute, I do not get up and just go to him—

Sleep, baby, Sleep. Our cottage vale is deep. The fearsome lamb is on the green, With woolly fleece so soft and clean. Sleep, baby, sleep. Her Birthday as Ashes in S