“Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smalle...” — Alice Oswald Quote

“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.”

“I try not to invent; I try simply to translate the weird language of the natural world. And I'm not into absolute ownership of things.”

“At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.”

“Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.”

“I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.”

“Fame is not all it's cracked up to be, and I felt self-conscious in the public eye.”