Time & Perspective Quote by Sharon Olds

Work here isn’t framed as ambition so much as annexation: a new job arrives and quickly colonizes the speaker’s entire life. Sharon Olds’s line is blunt, almost deliberately unpoetic, and that’s the point. The plainness has the hard sheen of testimony. No metaphor, no flourish, just the claustrophobic arithmetic of hours swallowed whole. It reads like a sentence you’d say to a friend and then, a beat later, realize it explains more than you meant to confess.

Olds’s intent often lives in that exact move: taking private experience (the body, the household, the daily humiliations of time) and refusing to dress it up. The subtext isn’t simply “I was busy.” It’s a quiet indictment of the modern bargain where “new job” is supposed to mean progress, stability, even identity, but in practice can mean a narrowing of self. “Didn’t have time” doubles as “wasn’t allowed time,” because the structure of work, not just personal choice, dictates the terms. The line is also a small portrait of how quickly care, rest, art, sex, friends - all the unruly, sustaining parts of being human - get demoted to optional.

Context matters: Olds has long written from the pressure points where intimacy meets power. Read in that light, this isn’t a productivity complaint; it’s a power relation rendered in domestic scale. The job doesn’t just take time. It takes the right to have a life that isn’t legible as labor.