Life's Pleasures Quote by Sharon Olds

The line lands like a confession delivered with a grin: a neat little inventory of virtues, immediately undercut by the one vice that refuses to be domesticated. Olds builds the joke on repetition and rhythm - “I did quit... and I did quit...” - a self-congratulatory cadence that sounds like someone rehearsing a success story for friends or family. Then comes the turn: “But I haven’t managed...” The phrase “managed that” is doing quiet work. It frames sobriety not as a moral conversion but as a logistics problem, a stubborn practical task that won’t submit to willpower alone.

Olds’s intent feels less like bragging about bad habits than puncturing the culture’s tidy narratives of self-improvement. Coffee and cigarettes are familiar redemption arcs: you stop, people applaud, the story ends. Drinking is different because it’s braided into social life, intimacy, loneliness, celebration, artistry - the whole messy continuum poets are paid to notice. The subtext is that some dependencies aren’t just chemical; they’re emotional technologies, ways of regulating pain or desire when language runs out.

Context matters: Olds’s work often sits in the domestic and bodily real, refusing to make trauma or appetite “tasteful.” Here, humor isn’t evasive; it’s a pressure release valve that lets the reader stay close to something serious without demanding piety. The sentence is compact, chatty, and disarming, and that’s why it stings: it sounds like ordinary talk, but it carries the unglamorous truth that the hardest things to quit are the ones that still feel like company.