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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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Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Didn
Anything
Work
Time
Took
Point
Jobs

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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.. 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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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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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
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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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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Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
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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The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
Sharon Olds
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A family is a mystery.
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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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
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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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 didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
Sharon Olds