Quote

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

Sharon Olds

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Speaking
Learned
Pleasure
Pain

More quotes by Sharon Olds

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
Sharon Olds
Image
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
Image
Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
Sharon Olds
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
Sharon Olds
Image
A family is a mystery.
Sharon Olds
Image
Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Sharon Olds
Image
When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.
Sharon Olds
Image
I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
Sharon Olds
Image
Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.
Sharon Olds
Image
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
Image
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
Image
At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.
Sharon Olds
Image
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