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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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Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Love
Seeing
Oneself
Dresses
Poems
Lent
Think
Age
Daughter
Beat
Breasts
Tooth
Thinking
War
Ordinary
Mirrors
Hotel
Exam
Back
Objects
Naked
Fairy
Gesture
Come
Parents
Experiences
Bright
Breast
Self
College
Photograph
Dress
Bathroom
Children
Memories
Beats
Newspapers
Newspaper
Way
Parent
Memory
Teeth
Gestures
Calvinist

More quotes by Sharon Olds

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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
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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I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
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
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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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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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Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
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'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 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.
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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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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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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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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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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Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
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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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Sharon Olds
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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