“I did not know him, I knew my idea
of him.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“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, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“it is
forbidden to love where we are not loved”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“Some people think I should
be over my ex by now — maybe
I thought I might have been over him more
by now. Maybe I’m half over who he
was, but not who I thought he was, and not
over the wound, sudden deathblow
as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core
of our life together.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“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, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“If I could
choose, a place to die,”
it would never have been in your arms, old darling”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“He fell in love with her because I
didn't suit him anymore -
nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he
saw it for me.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“And you couldn’t say,
could you, that the touch you had from me
was other than the touch of one
who could love for life—whether we were suited
or not—for life, like a sentence. And now that I
consider, the touch that I had from you
became not the touch of the long view, but like the
tolerant willingness of one
who is passing through.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“as if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All,
Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small;
A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent,
And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“let’s part
equals, as we were in every bed, pure
equals of the earth”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“I've said that he and I had been crazy
for each other. But maybe my ex and I were not
crazy for each other. Maybe we
were sane for each other, as if our desire
was almost not even personal -
it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there
seemed to be no other woman
or man in the world.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
“I want to relearn the intervals, to
journey with a man among the thirds and fifths,
augumented, diminshed, with a light touch,
sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual
adores and dotes - and of course what I reaaly
want is some low notes.”
― Sharon Olds, quote from Stag's Leap: Poems
Sharon Olds
Born place: in San Francisco, California, The United States
Born date November 19, 1942
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“Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, “I have to confess something. When we played ‘chicken’ from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber.” And I replied, “Samina, I didn’t love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home.” She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn’t an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“I know this – nobody gets everything. And we immigrants know this more than anyone. You always have one foot in two places. You can never be truly happy because, from the moment you leave, you are two selves, and wherever you are one half of you is always calling to the other. This is our price, Louisa. This is the cost of who we are.”
― Jojo Moyes, quote from Still Me
“The only conclusion I feel sure of at this point,” he mused, “is that women are too complicated.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
“One of my favorite things about New York is that you can pick up the phone and order anything and someone will deliver it to you. Once I lived for a year in another city, and almost every waking hour of my life was spent going to stores, buying things, loading them into the car, bringing them home, unloading them, and carrying them into the house. How anyone gets anything done in these places is a mystery to me.”
― Nora Ephron, quote from I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
“You have known, O Gilgamesh,
What interests me,
To drink from the Well of Immortality.
Which means to make the dead
Rise from their graves
And the prisoners from their cells
The sinners from their sins.
I think love's kiss kills our heart of flesh.
It is the only way to eternal life,
Which should be unbearable if lived
Among the dying flowers
And the shrieking farewells
Of the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes.”
― quote from The Epic of Gilgamesh
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The Assassin and the...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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