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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
Long
Women
Never
Wanted
Firsts
Come
Line
First
Stand
Take
Lines
Children
Pain
Even
Thought

More quotes by Sharon Olds

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If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
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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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
Sharon Olds
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Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.
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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Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
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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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
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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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I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
Sharon Olds
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I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
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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I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
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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A family is a mystery.
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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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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Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
Sharon Olds
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The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
Sharon Olds
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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Sharon Olds