Alice Oswald Quotes
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There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them.
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I like Patti Smith's lyrics, and sometimes think I could be influenced by them. But she has a kind of cool that's beyond me.
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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 falling to pieces.
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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 or rags; and they quickly fill up with un-things: old legs and wings and heads and hollow abdomens and body bags of wasps.
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Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers.
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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 and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form.
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It's the stickiness of earth that makes it problematic - the way it stains your straps and ingrains your hands so you can't quite tell where you start and stop.
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There's a lot of rage in my head. I like the friction that means there is nothing relaxing about writing a poem. I can't afford to relax in any area of life. You have to keep your senses awake to all the complacency that kicks in - particularly for the English.
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If you bend a branch until it's horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot.
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If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.
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I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.
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I really think there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate.
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Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.
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It's a relief to hear the rain. It's the sound of billions of drops, all equal, all equally committed to falling, like a sudden outbreak of democracy. Water, when it hits the ground, instantly becomes a puddle or rivulet or flood.
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At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.
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Most spiders eat and remake their webs every night.
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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.
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One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.
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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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Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.
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I have this exercise where I force myself to look out from the flower's point of view at these great walloping humans coming down the path, and try, just try and feel it from their point of view because it's a different world to them, a fascinating hard one.
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I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.
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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 as if you remade the garden every day.
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Even when writing your own poems, you need to talk to people; you need to magpie around, getting words and things. I'm very against the celebrity culture that wants to say: 'this is a genius, this is one person who has done something brilliant.' There are always a hundred people in the background who have helped to make it.