Best Sharon Olds Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I guess that's how people go on, without knowing how.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I feel like his victim, and he seems my victim”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“Sometimes I don't see exactly how to go on doing this.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“the flesh no one seems now to care to touch.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“Have faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“again, again, unquestioned, not fully seen, not wanting to fully see.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“And slowly he starts to seem more far away, he seems to waft, drift at a distance”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I think he loved being loved”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“We have always been going back, since birth, back toward not being alive.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): 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

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“And sometimes I feel as if, already, I am not here—”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“but he does not want to talk about it, he wants a stillness at the end of it.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“Before I turned out the light, he touched my face, then turned away, then the dark.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“where what cannot be seen is inferred by what the visible does.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I want to say to him, now, What was it like, to love me—when you looked at me, what did you see?”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“When he loved me, I looked out at the world as if from inside a profound dwelling, like a burrow or a well, I'd gaze up, at noon, and see Orion shining—when I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breath's time, but for the long continuance”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“He shows no anger, I show no anger but in flashes of humor, all is courtesy and horror.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I still dreamed it sometimes, the illusion of a constellation visible only from a certain vantage”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I never thought to see you again, I never thought to seek you.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“and it's as if my body has not heard, or hasn't believed, the news”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“in a sky whose darkness is fading, that first dream, from which I am now waking.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into every reach”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“He lived so enclosed in himself, he seemed alive not exactly like others, but hibernating”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“I called for him through solid earth until he woke, and left.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“Once, each summer, I howl, and draw myself back, out of there”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“we sweated side by side three times like a spell or a curse”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“the sight pierces me with tenderness, he was suffering, then, as I would soon.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

“He was so handsome it was kind of adorable when he looked horrible.”

Sharon Olds Stag S Leap

Book:Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems

Source: Stag's Leap (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Poems