Arias Quotes

“Sleep, baby,
Sleep. Our cottage vale is deep.
The fearsome lamb is on the green,
With woolly fleece so soft and clean.
Sleep, baby, sleep.



Her Birthday as Ashes in S”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“And suddenly I see I do
write poems in sentences—not broken into
lines, but wound around the caesura,
making a caduceus.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.
If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me,
something unnerving, as if I have no features,
I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth,
I am like a water bear talking to them,
or an amniotic traveler,
a vitreous floater on their own eyeball,
human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them
And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool,
so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of
mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses,
no floral tribute, no goddess, no grown-up
woman, no acknowledgment
of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the
gray matter of spirit talking,
the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard—
granite, ash, chalk, dust.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“What was arousing, to me,
for three decades, was faithfulness, the
chains of orgasms extreme beyond violent
in safety.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“But who could want that,
for a baby to have to know, with his life, who we
are at our worst, with his last eyes...

In this way
we gradually learn about our country.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“God damn it,
you sang, in your chains, for every thief
crucified, for every King and
X hash-hashinated, for every
Shepard hung by butcher birds from the
wire, for every whole note
hung by its rope from the score...
gnashing lies till they were dead, shaking the
lies’ bodies to be sure they did not
twitch”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“There is musicless
song, down there, atonal, coming
up from salt beating on stone,
beat without melody, mineral percussion,
as matter, like a sadist, played on your darling
bones”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“We said,
to each other, I think, whatever came into
our minds—put there by what the other
had just said—as if we dropped,
one by one, taking turns, those
intensely dried paper flowers
of my childhood, into a glass of water,
and watched them uncurl, fast, uneven,
and bright—and tossed another.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“The sheaves are in,
the sun is setting, like a meteor, deep
into the earth, and where is the one
we love? the one who looked after us?
He is under the haystack, fast asleep.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“And I wonder if the world is not silent—
to be inside of—if it groans, if it creaks
as it turns.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“my spirit was holding its breath...
there were planets, workaday,
rolling silent by, and luminous
moons, their backs to us, and troughs where
atoms turned inside out.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“When the farmer beats his wife who
beats the dog who beats the cat who
beats the mouse, who does the mouse
beat? She does not beat her young.
Maybe she beats the catskin drum.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“The glow, over the horizon,
flows, as if the moon is riding
on something.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“I do not know
what a soul is, I think of it
as the smallest, the core, civil right.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“Along the runway,
wind poured through the coat of horsetail
fur, and terns, in their skirts, fluttered
above the thumbnail and crochet-hook snails,
and we knock-swashed up, excreting fumes
of carbon fern and marrow—and in
the seat pocket, in front of me, were
crimped, furled buds, stems
bushy with fresh thorns,
and her last flagon of perfume, its glass
dove alighting to seize it...”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“Last thing, at dusk, I leaned out
the hotel window, like a seal sticking halfway
out of the concave comber it is riding.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“All was in place—
the fitted box of the planet, the tiered
sewing-table town.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“I wanted to go and stand inside
a blossoming fruit
tree, a cherry,
and look up,
into it,
and see the bright ganglia
of blue sky, and the many gathered
skirts of the multiple blooms”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“The X
of respects, and the boxing ring’s KO,
and the menstrual text—my father said,
in Kotex code, I break the hex, I
brek-a-kex-kex, I bless your art,
I bless your sex.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“But then I brought the shards
back together above the dash,
I drew in the web of the spider-line cracks...
and he fell to the earth, and slept on the grass”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“I did not know
I hated—I did not know there was meanness
in me, and permanent dysforgiveness
and scorn.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“I want
to gather the unaccented beats...
and thank them, give them treats, whatever a
feminine ending eats”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“Today I’d say
the birth room smelled like a fertilized garden,
like pungent nourishment, and haste,
and eagerness, and hard work, and waste.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“I have eaten
brains, my tongue loves to probe
the delicate folds”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“I recognize
the fog in the air, the shining of her dark
hair that curls around a finger like a night wood
shaving, I know her thrill and fear
of being observed”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“My mother never wanted me
to die. They were broken, in her, some of the
mechanisms of helping others
to thrive—she did not want me to thrive
more than she did, or as much as she did,
she had to triumph, but she wanted me
to breathe, even to sing, and my heart
to beat, without a quaver”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“next to some people
something walks, like a starveling, sometimes
for a lifetime.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“Did I ask
with the space in the ground, like a portion of breath,
where my body will rest, when it is motionless,
when its elements move back into the earth?”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“Eventually I’ll
launch my canoe
out my window,
when the flood gets up to 17,
and make my way to my mother and father,
taking no food, in order to get to them
sooner—to return, to them,
the last breath that each gave me
out of their mouth—to return to them
the alphabet they had entrusted to me.”
― Sharon Olds, Arias

“we cannot
keep a line
down for long, but must
throw it up, out of us,
for song, and in the middle of the night, as I
sleep with my mouth open, your music
sieves out onto the pillowcase,
seeping sweets like a hive”
― Sharon Olds, Arias