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I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first.

Sharon Olds

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Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Pain
Children
Thought
Even
Women
Long
Wanted
Never
Firsts
Come
Line
First
Stand
Lines
Take

More quotes by Sharon Olds

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.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
Sharon Olds
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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
Sharon Olds
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There is something in me maybe someday to be written now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.
Sharon Olds
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Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college a newspaper photograph of war a breast self-exam the tooth fairy Calvinist parents who beat up their children a gesture of love seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
Sharon Olds
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Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
Sharon Olds
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Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.
Sharon Olds
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A family is a mystery.
Sharon Olds
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I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
Sharon Olds
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Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.
Sharon Olds
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My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
Sharon Olds
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Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.
Sharon Olds
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At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.
Sharon Olds
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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Sharon Olds
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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.
Sharon Olds
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I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
Sharon Olds
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This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
Sharon Olds
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When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.
Sharon Olds
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The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
Sharon Olds
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I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
Sharon Olds
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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.
Sharon Olds