Quotes from Sharon Olds

and she is staring, as if the surface of her face is liquid— incredulous panic

As a child, he'd peered at the camera, as if trying to see into it, to its engineering

where did I think the rich got their money but from everyone else?

my spirit was holding its breath... there were planets, workaday, rolling silent by, and luminous moons, their backs to us, and troughs where atoms turned inside out.

I am glad not to have lost him entirely, but to see him moved at the whim of the sky, like a man in the wind

if I want to know a poem, Biblically, respiratorily, cardio- vascularly, I chart the rhythms of its lines—and I no longer fear that beat interests me so deeply because I was a child beaten to the 4/4 beat

he is like an icon, he is like a fantasy. I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

I do not let go of him yet, but hold the string and watch my idea of him pull away and stay, and pull away, my silver kite.

In the old photo, we are sitting, my sister upright, like a falls—her bridalveil spine, the ferro plumbline of her hair—and I, I hunched over, tongue sticking out, jaws working like a pair of kindergarten scissors.

And I tore my first puzzle piece of breath out of the sky—which I have yet to return

casting himself off a cliff in his fervor to get free of me.

The glacierscape called it up, the silent, shining tulle, the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems and corollaries, that girl who had thought a wedding promise was binding as a law of physics.

as he soars from the precipice edge, dreamy.

we cannot keep a line down for long, but must throw it up, out of us, for song, and in the middle of the night, as I sleep with my mouth open, your music sieves out onto the pillowcase, seeping sweets like a hive

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.

it was never in doubt that you had suffered more than I when young.

It's so quiet, and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape, a ground without a figure.

I sat on the air above it and looked down on its uninhabitable beauty.

Eventually I'll launch my canoe out my window, when the flood gets up to 17, and make my way to my mother and father, taking no food, in order to get to them sooner—to return, to them, the last breath that each gave me out of their mouth—to return to them the alphabet they had entrusted to me.

the motion was authentic, it was from another place, it was planetary, it was model-of-the-solar- systemic.

Did I ask with the space in the ground, like a portion of breath, where my body will rest, when it is motionless, when its elements move back into the earth?

I am falling, and I do not feel that there are rocks, below, I think I may go on falling, like my own flesh, for the rest of my life

Suave qui peut —let those who can save themselves save themselves.

I idolized it without reserve, caution, or limit, I adored it with an unprotected joy.