Quotes from Sharon Olds

where what cannot be seen is inferred by what the visible does.

I want to say to him, now, What was it like, to love me—when you looked at me, what did you see?

Have faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.

We have always been going back, since birth, back toward not being alive.

When he loved me, I looked out at the world as if from inside a profound dwelling, like a burrow or a well, I'd gaze up, at noon, and see Orion shining—when I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breath's time, but for the long continuance

He shows no anger, I show no anger but in flashes of humor, all is courtesy and horror.

I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life.

again, again, unquestioned, not fully seen, not wanting to fully see.

But who could want that, for a baby to have to know, with his life, who we are at our worst, with his last eyes... In this way we gradually learn about our country.

We joked about putting it off, but underneath the joking, grim and hidden, he wanted to leave me, and he was working toward it and against it, maybe worried he could not do it, longing for it and fearing it, and not speaking of it

and for an instant he's alive toward me, a gem of sea of pond in his eye. Then that retreat into himself, which always moved me, as if there were a sideways gravity, in him, toward some vanishing point.

And no, he does not want to meet again, in a year—when we part, it is with a dry bow and Good-bye.

seeking how to accept him as he was, under the law that he could not speak—and when I shrieked against the law he shrinked down into its absolute, he rose from its departure gate.

and there is nothing to be done for it, it can only be known and borne, it cannot be turned into anything fruitful or sweet, but just be faced, as what it was

And it entered my strictured heart, this morning, slightly, shyly as if warily, untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness and plenty of his ongoing life, unknown to me, unseen by me, unheard by me, untouched by me, but known by others, seen by others, heard, touched.

and I could tell her the best of my poor, partial love, I could sing her out, with it, I saw the luck and the luxury of that hour.

I sang the mothers and fathers out, into the stars and the nothing beyond them, into which we will follow them, at the end of our turn.

The glow, over the horizon, flows, as if the moon is riding on something.

and anyways this boy knows what's what, he can look deep into his own heart and tell you the nature of the human - kindness, courtesy, force.

I think he had come, in private, to feel he was dying, with me

And so he went into another world—this world, where I do not see or hear him

And I wonder if the world is not silent— to be inside of—if it groans, if it creaks as it turns.

The sheaves are in, the sun is setting, like a meteor, deep into the earth, and where is the one we love? the one who looked after us? He is under the haystack, fast asleep.

We said, to each other, I think, whatever came into our minds—put there by what the other had just said—as if we dropped, one by one, taking turns, those intensely dried paper flowers of my childhood, into a glass of water, and watched them uncurl, fast, uneven, and bright—and tossed another.