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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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Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Ordinary
Poet
Feelings
Valves
Like
Valve
People
Steam
Shown
Poets
Escape

More quotes by Sharon Olds

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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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A family is a mystery.
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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.
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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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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
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The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.
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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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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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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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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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I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
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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 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.
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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.
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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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I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
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I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
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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.
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Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
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Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
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