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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
Used
Village
Might
Extreme
Time
Extremes
Horror
Amount
Hear
Quite
Villages
Heard
Horrors

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The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
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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.
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I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
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I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
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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.
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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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I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.
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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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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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