There’s a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can’t stand them. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave, and you don’t have to think for yourself, or you’re a master, and you don’t have to work for yourself. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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 stands waiting for light, which it catches in the close-woven sieves of its leaves. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
Wind ought to be a verb or an adverb. It isn’t really anything. It’s a manner of movement of warmth and cold: a kind of information system of the air. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
