Ruth Padel > Quotes

“Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it.”
― Ruth Padel

“Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness.”
― Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self

“How difficult it is to see
The things we love
With all this shadow round us,
This brief time we're here.”
― Ruth Padel, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You

“You break my sleep
And something like my heart.”
― Ruth Padel, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You

“Collect yourself: to smother what you feel, recall to order, summon in one place; making, like Orpheus, a system against loss.”
― Ruth Padel, Darwin: A Life in Poems

“Tomorrow
is a mystery, today is a gift from God.
Without the dark we'd never see the stars.

-In the Lydian Mode”
― Ruth Padel, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life

“I'll follow, if you give the sign.”
― Ruth Padel, Rembrandt Would Have Loved You

“Poetry or science, what matters is saying it how you see it. Saying precisely what and how you saw, and no more. In science, poetry or describing a journey, accuracy is all you can do. Saying it as you saw.”
― Ruth Padel, Tigers In Red Weather: A Quest for the Last Wild Tigers

“What we forget makes us who we are.
Most of our life vanishes in the swirls
of the brain's mysterious mirror
but you can't stop looking back. At scarlet pearls
strewn through the desert, footprints of blood,
your journey away from your love.

- India Dreams”
― Ruth Padel, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life

“The earth moves if you get it right.”
― Ruth Padel, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life

“Spirit does not - as we have been told -
keep trying to peel away from atoms of your body but is embedded in nature

and you - yourself - are the crucible
in which base metal can be turned to gold.”
― Ruth Padel, Emerald

“Birds of the Western Front

Your mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hover
above the shelling. They don't turn a feather
when hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth,

flickering star-shells
and flares from the Revelation of St John.
You look away

from artillery lobbing roar and suck and snap
against one corner of a thicket
to the partridge of the war zone

making its nest in shattered clods.
History
floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You cling
to the hard dry stars of observation.

How you survive. They were all at it:
Orchids of the Crimea
nature notes from the trench

leaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldron
with souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath -
for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch

flashed like mediaeval glass.
You replace gangrene and gas mask
with a dream of alchemy: language of the birds

translating human earth
to abstract and divine. While machine-gun
tracery gutted that stricken wood

you watched the chaffinch flutter to and fro
through splintered branches, breaking buds
and never a green bough left.

Hundreds lay in there wounded.
If any, you say, spotted one bird
they may have wondered why a thing with wings

would stay in such a place.
She must have, sure, had chicks
she was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert.

Like roots clutching at air
you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawn
sounding insincere

above the burning bush: plough-land
latticed like folds of brain
with shell-ravines where nothing stirs

but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice
sliding across your faces every night.
Where every elixir's gone wrong

you hold to what you know.
A little nature study. A solitary magpie
blue and white

spearing a strand of willow.
One for sorrow. One for Babylon,
Ninevah and Northern France,

for mice and desolation, the burgeoning
barn-owl population
and never a green bough left.”
― Ruth Padel

“Is this what it sounds like, going deaf?”
― Ruth Padel, Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life