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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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 free. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Alice Oswald Read Quote
When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer. Alice Oswald Read Quote
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. Like a flame, whose meaning is light but whose centre is dark, it demands to be undefined. Alice Oswald Read Quote
Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers. Alice Oswald Read Quote
I believe the poet shouldn’t be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears. Alice Oswald Read Quote
