Simon Armitage quotes

Where does the hand become the wrist? where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor's edge between something and nothing, between one and the other. (Simon Armitage)
This misfortune you find is of your own manufacture. Keep hold of what you have, it will harm no other, for hatred comes home to the hand that chose it.
Simon Armitage
Right here you made an angel of yourself, free-falling backwards into last night's snow, indenting a straight, neat, crucified shape, then flapping your arms, one stroke, a great bird, to leave the impression of wings. It worked.
Simon Armitage
Here's how they rated him when the looked back: sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
Simon Armitage
it says NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS but it don't say why.
Simon Armitage
I've made out a will: I'm leaving myself to the National Health. I'm sure they can use the jellies and tubes and syrups and glues...
Simon Armitage
People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.
Simon Armitage
The Huddersfield that I like best is a large town with a big heart and an open mind.
Simon Armitage
If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.
Simon Armitage
My party piece: I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves beyond its means, and dies, I say the story of my life.
Simon Armitage
Lifetimes went past. With the critical mass of hardly more than the thought of a thought I kept on, headlong, to vanishing point. I looked for an end, for some dimension to hold hard and resist. But I still exist. (Simon Armitage)
You're beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet.
Simon Armitage
We walk to the ward from the badly parked car with your grandma taking four short steps to our two. We have brought her here to die and we know it.
Simon Armitage
All land lines are down. Reports of mobile phones are false. One half-excoriated Apple Mac still quotes the Dow Jones.
Simon Armitage
Think, two things on their own and both at once.
Simon Armitage
That heart had been an apple once, they reckoned. Green. They had a scheme to plant an apple there again beginning with a pip, but he rejected it.
Simon Armitage
Mother, any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands.
Simon Armitage
In a life, most of us turn no more than 45 degrees. Not much compared to those who turn full-circle in the slighest breeze or those who totally uncoil, but enough in the end to tell a bag of diamonds from a sack of coal.
Simon Armitage
Ignite the flares, connect the phones, wind all the clocks; the sun goes rusty like a medal in its box - collect it from the loft. Peg out the stars, replace the bulbs of Jupiter and Mars. A man like that takes something with him when he dies, but he has wept the coins that rested on his eyes, eased out the stopper from the mouthpiece of the cave, exhumed his own white body from the grave.
Simon Armitage
Boy with the name and face I don't remember, you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.
Simon Armitage
I once stood in the middle of New York city watching my name go round the electronic zipper sign in Times Square and I felt pretty thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as I felt when I saw my name in the Examiner for the first time. (Simon Armitage)
I'd got to a point where I wanted a break.
Simon Armitage
We still need a voice that thinks before it speaks.
Simon Armitage
I wondered if people might not have had enough of Simon Armitage and wondered whether I hadn't had enough of Simon Armitage.
Simon Armitage
I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
Simon Armitage