Quotes from Ruth Padel

Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it.

How difficult it is to see The things we love With all this shadow round us, This brief time we're here.

I'll follow, if you give the sign.

You break my sleep And something like my heart.

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.

Collect yourself: to smother what you feel, recall to order, summon in one place; making, like Orpheus, a system against loss.

Is this what it sounds like, going deaf?

The earth moves if you get it right.

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.