A Quote by 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.
Because the utopian's worldview was framed around moving toward this perfected future, it helped stimulate the private exertions that add up to social progress. Progress is work. People need to build things and sacrifice and have a harder life for things to get better. On its own, I don't think even the most brilliant critique stimulates that kind of effort as well as an appealing vision of the future.
I think it's helped me evolve all around, as an artist and as a person. I think we need something, need something to believe in. We need something that makes us pay attention to these humbling experiences.
It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened. I always wished I had done more with my work; I wished I had written more books. I used to beat myself up over it. Now I see that never did any good. Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.
You have to learn to follow your heart. You can’t let other people pressure you into being something that you’re not. If you want God’s favor in your life, you must be the person He made you to be, not the person your boss wants you to be, not even the person your parents or your husband wants you to be. You can’t let outside expectations keep you from following your own heart.
For me, working in the fashion industry is about getting to meet the minds behind the brands. Sure, there are nice dinners, events and shows - even the occasional freebie - but the best part is getting to sit down with and talk to people that have done great things. You quickly realize that no matter who you're talking to, how famous, brilliant or wealthy they are, they are just "people."
What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings.
I always like to make people happy, make them have a good time. It's pretty obvious if the room is dead - if no one is cheering or singing or whatever, there's obviously something wrong. I always try to look for euphoric feelings, things people are excited that they're hearing, and then I build from there. It's hard to explain, actually. When I'm in the mood, I just feel it. Now they need something with vocals, now they need something hard, something soft.
To be a good artist, you need to be sensitive to the world around you, you need to be curious, you need to listen, you need to be willing to learn from people. A lot of great art is about people being moved by something or seeing something that stops them dead.
Rather than shutting down free speech, we need to broaden it, to make it possible for young people to say even the things we dislike so we can talk them down. And we need politicians to articulate a picture of the future that includes all of us. Not British values but shared human values.
A lot of people that make films say, 'We need this kind of character. Who's done it before? Get them to do it again.' That is exactly what actors are pushing against. It's kind of a cliche to talk about being stereotyped in that way, but it happens.
And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
Young people need something stable to hang on to - a culture connection, a sense of their own past, a hope for their own future. Most of all, they need what grandparents can give them.
Getting along well with other people is still the world's most needed skill. With it...there is no limit to what person can do. We need people, we need the cooperation of others. There is very little we can do alone
It doesn't make sense. [Republicans are] not for us. You're not for my values. We're working class people mostly and blue collar. We're your cops, we're your firemen, we're your carpenters and the things we need - we need to protect our unions, we need to protect our Medicare, we need to protect the working class person.
Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.
Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it.
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