Ruth Padel Quotes & Sayings

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

You break my sleep
And something like my heart. — Ruth Padel

I'll follow, if you give the sign. — 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

What we feel is mortal, and won't come again. — Ruth Padel

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

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

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