Alice Oswald Quotes

• 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

  Eye, Dark, Light

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

  Alice Oswald

  Running, Spring, Flower

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• I stood looking down through the beech trees. When I threw a stone I could count to five before the splash. Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head, through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm, giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it, water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding. When my body was in some way a wave to swim in, one continuous fin from head to tail, I steered through rapids like a canoe, digging my hands in, keeping just ahead of the river.

  Alice Oswald

  Hands, Order, Rivers

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• There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.

  Alice Oswald

  Real, Government, Voice

  "Why I pulled out of the TS Eliot poetry prize" by Alice Oswald, www.theguardian.com. December 12, 2011.

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• If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, youll see something of the difference between Homers poetry and anyone elses. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the Iliad, real animals, real people, real light attending everything.

  Alice Oswald

  Real, Animal, Light

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• Most spiders eat and remake their webs every night.

  Alice Oswald

  Night, Spiders, Remakes

  4 Copy quote

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