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1 " Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it. "
― Ruth Padel
2 " 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
3 " 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
4 " Spirit does not - as we have been told -keep trying to peel away from atoms of your body but is embedded in natureand you - yourself - are the cruciblein which base metal can be turned to gold. "
― Ruth Padel , Emerald
5 " Birds of the Western FrontYour mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hoverabove the shelling. They don't turn a featherwhen hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth,flickering star-shellsand flares from the Revelation of St John.You look awayfrom artillery lobbing roar and suck and snapagainst one corner of a thicketto the partridge of the war zonemaking its nest in shattered clods. History floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You clingto the hard dry stars of observation.How you survive. They were all at it:Orchids of the Crimeanature notes from the trenchleaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldronwith souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath - for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch flashed like mediaeval glass.You replace gangrene and gas maskwith a dream of alchemy: language of the birds translating human earth to abstract and divine. While machine-guntracery 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 chicksshe was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert.Like roots clutching at air you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawnsounding insincere above the burning bush: plough-landlatticed like folds of brainwith shell-ravines where nothing stirs but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice sliding across your faces every night. Where every elixir's gone wrongyou 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. "
6 " How difficult it is to seeThe things we loveWith all this shadow round us,This brief time we're here. "
― Ruth Padel , Rembrandt Would Have Loved You
7 " 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
8 " I'll follow, if you give the sign. "
9 " You break my sleep And something like my heart. "
10 " Is this what it sounds like, going deaf? "
― Ruth Padel , Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life
11 " The earth moves if you get it right. "
