A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

Attention Best Class Education Effort Express Forms Having Human Long Long-Term Natural Paying Poet Poetic Question Rather Serious Something Term Top Understanding Well

Quote Author

Alice Oswald
British - Poet
Born: 1966

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

Joanna Russ

Doctors are human; they make mistakes, and you have to stay on top of them. You have to ask the second question, the third question, the follow-up to the fourth question.

Robby Benson

If we human beings learn to see the intricacies that bind one part of a natural system to another and then to us, we will no longer argue about the importance of wilderness protection, or over the question of saving endangered species, or how human communities must base their economic futures - not on short-term exploitation - but on long-term, sustainable development.

Gaylord Nelson

I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular to them. It allows you not to ask the question, "What's wrong with me?" and begin to ask the question, "What's wrong with this place that I'm in?"

Claudia Rankine

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.

Adam Kirsch

What is remarkable about the Greeks - even pre-philosophically - is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.

Rebecca Goldstein

No, hear me out. The long answer to that question is that everything about me has changed since meeting you. What I wanted five months ago is different from what I want today. Did I want a human body? Yes, very much. Is it my top priority now? No." He looked at me with serious eyes."I gave up something I wanted for something I need. And I need you, Angel. More than I think you'll ever know. ~Patch

Becca Fitzpatrick

We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.

William Graham Sumner

I'm the blackest member of my family. You know, these mixed families produce children of all colors, and in Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were, in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question. Because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.

Stuart Hall

Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.

Pete Townshend

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

Robert Graves

The first question we usually ask new parents is : “Is it a boy or a girl ?”. There is a great answer to that one going around : “We don’t know ; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.

Kate Bornstein

While natural disasters capture headlines and national attention short-term, the work of recovery and rebuilding is long-term.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell

The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Because of climate changes, it's not just a question of producing energy. It's a question of producing energy in a way that we can live with in the long term. If you look at the available pieces, from conservation to nuclear, solar, whatever, and you put them all together, we can't do it.