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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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Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Quite
Villages
Heard
Horrors
Used
Village
Might
Extreme
Time
Extremes
Horror
Amount
Hear

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I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.
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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.
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Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
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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.
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This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
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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.
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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.
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I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
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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.
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A family is a mystery.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
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