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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
Escape
Ordinary
Poet
Feelings
Valves
Like
Valve
People
Steam
Shown
Poets

More quotes by Sharon Olds

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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.
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
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I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
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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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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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
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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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I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
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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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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I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
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.
Sharon Olds
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I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain
Sharon Olds
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A family is a mystery.
Sharon Olds
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This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
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 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
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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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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