Top 40 Sharon Olds Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”

— Sharon Olds

2. “Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.”

— Sharon Olds

3. “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

4. “I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain.”

— Sharon Olds

5. “I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.”

— Sharon Olds

6. “The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.”

— Sharon Olds

7. “Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.”

— Sharon Olds

8. “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.”

— Sharon Olds

9. “Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.”

— Sharon Olds

10. “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

11. “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

12. “I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.”

— Sharon Olds

13. “Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.”

— Sharon Olds

14. “When I quit all these things and said I didn’t have any time, I meant I didn’t have any time.”

— Sharon Olds

15. “We’re all taking on too much, we’re all asking too much of ourselves. We’re all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more.”

— Sharon Olds

16. “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

17. “The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it’s wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.”

— Sharon Olds

18. “A family is a mystery.”

— Sharon Olds

19. “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

20. “I didn’t have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.”

— Sharon Olds

21. “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

22. “This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.”

— Sharon Olds

23. “Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It’s not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.”

— Sharon Olds

24. “One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.”

— Sharon Olds

25. “She’d crack A joke sharp as a tin lid Hot from the teeth of the can-opener, And cackle her crack-corn laugh.”

— Sharon Olds

26. “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

27. “To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body – the senses are part of the brain. I guess they’re not where the thinking is done.”

— Sharon Olds

28. “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

29. “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

30. “So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven’t managed that with drinking!”

— Sharon Olds

31. “It might be a bad thing, not to know what’s going on in the world. I can’t say I really approve of it.”

— Sharon Olds

32. “Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.”

— Sharon Olds

33. “I can tell you we were right, our bodies were right, life was really going to be that good, that pleasurable in every cell. Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but better than that the bright corners of your eyes, or the light of your face, the rich Long Island puppy-fat of your thighs, or the slick chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I remember your extraordinary act of courage in loving me.”

— Sharon Olds

34. “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

35. “At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn’t have time to do anything but work.”

— Sharon Olds

36. “Every poet I know – although there may be some I don’t know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don’t teach – tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.”

— Sharon Olds

37. “I’m probably so out of it at my age that I don’t know what people think.”

— Sharon Olds

38. “Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.”

— Sharon Olds

39. “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

40. “I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.”

— Sharon Olds

41. “I think he loved being loved.”

— Sharon Olds

42. “Well, one thing I’m really interested in, when I’m writing, is being accurate.”

— Sharon Olds

43. “The older I get, the more I feel.”

— Sharon Olds

44. “Seeing yourself as responsible for the quality of your relationship, as a prime mover in your life, I think is a bold, amazing step.”

— Sharon Olds