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"Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience."
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"Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against."
"And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs."
"A misadventure is an act that has a safer, less self-detrimental, less interesting alternative. But you choose that act because you want to do something memorable and worthy of discussion."
"How long does the experience of pleasure or pain stay with you? For as long as there is weakness within. Then, further ahead they will not be there. There, one remains the 'Knower' of experience of pleasure and pain."
"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
"At least I can say I once worked a day on a tea plantation in Far North Queensland."
"Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine."
"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."
"Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord."
"What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering."
Explore more quotes by Sharon Olds
"Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere."
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