128 Quotes by Alice Oswald

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.

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.