Category - Alice Oswald

Discover the thoughtful Quotes of Alice Oswald, a philosopher and author. Our collection of his most impactful quotes reflects his deep understanding of language, philosophy, and history. Motivational Quotes of Alice Oswald
Whether seeking thought-provoking reflections or academic wisdom, Alice Oswalds words offer a rich source of intellectual inspiration. #AliceOswald Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald

Most spiders eat and remake their webs every night.

– Alice Oswald

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

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

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

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

Alice Oswald

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

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

Alice Oswald

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

Alice Oswald

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

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

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

Alice Oswald

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

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