A Quote by Sharon Olds

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.
I don't think anyone can really claim to be a really close friend of Amitabh Bachchan. There are so many things people don't know, even I don't know. He has a few people who are close and he likes it that way.
We're free out here, really free for the first time. We're floating, literally. Gravity can't bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it's only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else - it's the right environment for them. Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream.
He was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better.
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
My family and friends are the only people I pay mind to. It's none of my business what anyone else thinks. I don't even know them, so why should I care?
I'll say about Fueled By Ramen is, I don't know what anyone else's experience has been, but we signed to them as Fun. We already had a fanbase, we already had music out there so when they signed us they were signing our vision. I always think it's so weird when people think that Fueled By Raman are trying to change us or mould us into something else, as we weren't a bunch of kids playing in a garage who joined a label and then collectively worked on a vision, like, they signed us with the intention of letting us be Fun.
It is immature and lazy to imagine we know everything there is to know about someone before we know that someone. We don't know their stories, their histories, their real live human feelings. We don't know their favorite movies and best memories and what makes them afraid. It is unfair to take one fact, one thing they've said or we heard they said, or one thing they wrote, or someone else's experience, or a group they identify with and make a character sketch. If people did that to us, the picture would be so woefully incomplete, we wouldn't even recognize our own description.
I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.
At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.
It's not a lot, but we have 8,000 people following us. I get the biggest kick out of it, to hear words that I wrote and chords that I wrote being sung by somebody else. It's a true honor, and it might sound intense, but it's one of the most rewarding parts of the songwriting experience.
Even then, I didn't quite know what to make of it [captain Kirk death]. I was mystified by why I was doing it, why I was so driven to do it, and why it was affecting me like it was. I still don't know what it means. It's a strange singular experience. I don't even know anyone to talk to about it because I don't know anyone who's had that experience.
"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.
We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.
I'm convinced that a lot of people simply don't know what's available out there and how it is possible to find a job and work your way up if you are willing to accept responsibility for your life. I know what it's like to be on the bottom. I've been broke. I've been fired seven times from jobs. And I don't even have a college degree. But I didn't blame anyone else for my problems. I knew that if I didn't try to solve them on my own or with the help of friends or family members, no one else was going to take care of me.
Writing your own blog platform is like roasting your own coffee: it's impractical and you probably shouldn't do it, but for people who really, truly care about it, it's worthwhile to them for their own personal priorities that sound crazy to everyone else. Well, I write my own blog platform and I roast my own coffee.
If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!