Sharon Olds Quotes

“I guess that's how people go on, without
knowing how.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“and my job is to eat the whole car
of my anger, part by part, some parts
ground down to steel-dust.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“So much had become so connected to him
that it seemed to belong to him, so that now,
flying, for hours, above the Atlantic
still felt like being over his realm.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“seeking how to accept him as
he was, under the law that he could not
speak—and when I shrieked against the law
he shrinked down into its absolute,
he rose from its departure gate.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“In his gaze,
rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-
emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
knowing he would never once, in this world or in
any other, have to do it again,
and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
still without the strength of anger, but I
saw him see me, even now
that dropping down into trust's affection
in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
and I said, Good-bye, and he said Good-bye”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“Sometimes
I don't see exactly how to go on doing this.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“I am so ashamed
before my friends—to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“the flesh no one seems now
to care to touch.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“Have faith,
old heart. What is living, anyway,
but dying.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“I had not put into
words, yet—the worst thing,
but I thought that I could say it, if I said it
word by word.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“If I ever
prayed, as a child, for everlasting
union, these were its shoes: one dew-licked
kicked-off slipper of a being now flying, one
sunrise-milk-green boot of the dead,
which I wore, as I dreamed.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“It struck cold awe to my heart,
now, to look at who I had been
who had thought it was impossible
that he or I could touch another.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“And to live in those rooms,
where one of his smiles might emerge, like something
almost from another place,
another time, another set
of creatures, was to feel blessed, and to be
held in mysteriousness, and a little
in mourning.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“again,
again, unquestioned, not fully seen,
not wanting to fully see.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“We joked about putting it off, but
underneath the joking, grim
and hidden, he wanted to leave me, and he was
working toward it and against it, maybe worried
he could not do it, longing for it
and fearing it, and not speaking of it”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“and there is
nothing to be done for it,
it can only be known and borne, it cannot be
turned into anything fruitful or sweet,
but just be faced, as what it was”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“and love
seemed to rest, on us, in a place
where, for that hour, it felt death could not
reach, and someone was singing in my hearing, without
words, that no one can live without reaching
death, but I could have lived without having
loved almost without reserve, and for a
moment, then, I thought I lived forever with him.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“And slowly he starts to seem more far
away, he seems to waft, drift
at a distance”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“If I could
choose, a place to die,”
it would never have been in your arms, old darling,
we figured I'd see you out, in mine”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“That moved me so much about you,
the way you were a dumbstruck one
and yet you seemed to know everything
I did not know”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“I think he loved being loved”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“We have always been going back, since birth,
back toward not being alive.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“But if feels as if he's not here—
though he's here, it feels as if, for me,
there's no one there”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“Now I see
I've been hoping, each time we meet, that he would praise me
for how well I took it, but it's not to be.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“and for an instant
he's alive toward me, a gem of sea of
pond in his eye. Then that retreat into himself,
which always moved me, as if there were
a sideways gravity, in him, toward some
vanishing point.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“And no, he does not
want to meet again, in a year—when we
part, it is with a dry bow
and Good-bye.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“And it entered my strictured heart, this morning,
slightly, shyly as if warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard by me, untouched by me,
but known by others, seen by others,
heard, touched.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“One of us
maybe a little too much a hunter,
the other a little too polar of affection,
polar of summer mysteriousness,
magnetic in reticent mourning.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems