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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Alice Oswald Quotes

I believe the poet shouldn’t be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

– Alice Oswald

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

Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers.

– Alice Oswald

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

I hate not managing to speak clearly. I really hate it. I get a feeling of claustrophobia – like I’m locked in my own head – if what I’ve said hasn’t reached someone.

– Alice Oswald

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

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

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it’s a question of paying attention.

– Alice Oswald

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

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.

– Alice Oswald

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

Most spiders eat and remake their webs every night.

– Alice Oswald

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.

– Alice Oswald

I really think there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate.

– Alice Oswald

It’s a question of trying to take down by dictation what’s already there. I’m not making something, I’m trying to hear it.

– Alice Oswald

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.

– Alice Oswald

There’s a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can’t stand them.

– Alice Oswald

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.

– Alice Oswald

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.

– Alice Oswald

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.

– Alice Oswald

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

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that’s something totally different from the slow way you read something if it’s a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

– Alice Oswald

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

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.

– Alice Oswald

I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I’m not into absolute ownership of things.

– Alice Oswald

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.

– Alice Oswald