Quotes from Sharon Olds

Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into every reach

And they do not know language, they are waiting for him

refreshing to live with, beings without the knowledge of death, creatures of ignorant suffering.

I do not know what a soul is, I think of it as the smallest, the core, civil right.

He lived so enclosed in himself, he seemed alive not exactly like others, but hibernating

I called for him through solid earth until he woke, and left.

Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people. If they're close enough, they can see something is different with me, something unnerving, as if I have no features, I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth, I am like a water bear talking to them, or an amniotic traveler, a vitreous floater on their own eyeball, human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them.

a heart's spurt of rage.

Once, each summer, I howl, and draw myself back, out of there

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine looks like my husband, casting himself off a cliff in his fervor to get free of me.

I feel like a landscape, a ground without a figure.

I always feared this would happen, I thought it would be a pure horror, but it's just home

we sweated side by side three times like a spell or a curse

Some birds hop, bouncing along like little pocketless kangaroos, and a crow walks along with coins singing in her trousers.

I lived alongside him, in his hush and reserve

the sight pierces me with tenderness, he was suffering, then, as I would soon.

An atom bomb—does it reduce everything to atoms—to a mist the size of the moon? And the hydrogen bomb—is there water in it? When you drop it, does the mushroom above it look like a splash, as if you'd dropped the moon onto the ocean? If you dropped the moon onto the Pacific, would its diameter fit? Eight moons dropped onto the Pacific would fit on it.

And then there is the spring park, damp as if freshly peeled, sweet greenhouse, green cemetery with no dead in it—except, in some shaded woods, under some years of leaves and rotted cones, the body of a warbler like a whole note fallen from the sky—my old love for him, like a songbird's rib cage picked clean.

O say can you see him as I see him now, as if he had no one to answer to, he so prepared to devour and excrete the hopes he'd been handed on a platter, the spoon in his mouth, he could eat what he had not earned, he could do it in his sleep.

A week later, I said to a friend: I don't think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

But now it was time to go beyond comfort, to part.

If I had to see my face while I am writing this, I would not write it. When I was a child, I was encouraged to speak from behind a tree as if I were the tree, or speak as if up from out of the ground, or, as a white adult, to speak out from within a white adult—how easy that has made my life is almost invisible to me.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.