Alice Oswald Quotes

15 quotes in 350 categories

• I stood looking down through the beech trees. When I threw a stone I could count to five before the splash. Then I jumped in…
• Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers.
• There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the…
• At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more…
• I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence…
• I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is left…
• One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning -…
• I really think there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate.
• A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side…
• A living tree is a changing, sleeve shape, a wet, thin, bright green creature that survives in the thin layer between heartwood and bark. It…
• When the wind blows through a wood, its mass is cut and closed by every leaf, forming a train of jittery vortices in the air.
• Webs are made mostly of spaces. They break easily. They barely exist. They belong to the category of half-things: mist, smoke, shrouds, ghosts, membranes, retinas…
• Most spiders eat and remake their webs every night.
• The sea has this contradictory quality, that the more you see of it, the more it overwhelms the eye and disappears in its own brightness.…
• When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.

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