Quotes from Sharon Olds

there was something wistful about her, under the burnish of her makeup she looked extremely young, and a little afraid. I wanted to speak to her, as if I were a guardian spirit working the airport—God knows I was crazed with my fresh solitariness— so I did a little double take, when I passed her, and said, Could I ask, where did you get your sandals—my husband, I lied, wants me to get some, and she said a name, as if relieved to speak.

instead of kissing and being kissed, I'll go through airports praising people, like an Antichrist saying, You do not need to change your life.

I feel that ignorant love gave me a life. But from within my illusion of him I could not see him, or know him.

God damn it, you sang, in your chains, for every thief crucified, for every King and X hash-hashinated, for every Shepard hung by butcher birds from the wire, for every whole note hung by its rope from the score... gnashing lies till they were dead, shaking the lies' bodies to be sure they did not twitch

he was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust.

My mother's people came here yearning to sing to their God, to breathe free, men and women attacked by their landlords, who called them wretched refuse, teeming with vermin. They'd pushed off from that shore, homeless on the ocean, through calm and tempest

only a sojourner, in our home, where the heart, after its long, good years, was sparrow-netted to make its own cage

I put my hand on the mastodon of his buoyant hand, which was resting, now, as a swimmer at the end of a stroke may glide, may glide, desire, desire, rest, desire.

And now I could hear the music think, as I had heard it then, the unspooling of the logic of being mortal—of dying, as my best friend had, when I was nine, and my beloved, when I was sixteen. I heard, again, what loving and being loved might sound like—or I heard what some comfort for the loss of that might sound like. I heard the body and soul of death—of love and death.

Many cells inside my ears, in the ossicle, and malleus, cochlea, have died where they lived and worked—I don't know if they're there, still, looking like themselves but dead, or if their corpses wore away, broke down to their elements and were shuffled off by capillaries, I don't know if I peed them out and now they're in an ocean bay or trench, or if I breathed them out, I might breathe one in again.

I said I was tired of loving my mother and father—I was so vain about being able to love them. But who says I love them? If I loved them, I could love myself.

He was so handsome it was kind of adorable when he looked horrible.

and farther into cold fog I let him go, I lay and stretched on love's fucking stretcher, and let him wander on his own the haunt salt mazes.

And I panic, a little, for my mother, I want to say: Remember, I never understood her—in a way, I never knew her. All morning I am glad to think of the arachnid, hunting on her own terms, inside the moist crinolines of the arboreal flowers, far from me, free of me, alive, unseen.

I wanted to go and stand inside a blossoming fruit tree, a cherry, and look up, into it, and see the bright ganglia of blue sky, and the many gathered skirts of the multiple blooms

I don't know if I could do it, actually—aim my right hook at my mother's little glass jaw, and follow through, reckless to express myself

I thought wherever we were, we were in lasting love— even in our separateness and loneliness, in love

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.

Sleep and dream—but not of his return.

I was not the one he wanted to rise from or return to

It is in the past, enough looking back, it is gone, it is more over with than the shocks of childhood.

When the farmer beats his wife who beats the dog who beats the cat who beats the mouse, who does the mouse beat? She does not beat her young. Maybe she beats the catskin drum.

What if someone had told me, thirty years ago: If you give up, now, wanting to be an artist, he might love you all your life—what would I have said? I didn't even have an art, it would could from out of our family's life— what could I have said: nothing will stop me.

I had not remembered how deep he held himself inside himself