Simon Armitage Quotes

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All land lines are down.
Reports of mobile phones
are false. One half-excoriated Apple Mac still quotes the Dow Jones.”

“Think, two things on their own and both at once.”

“Here's how they rated him when the looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.”

“it says NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS
but it don't say why.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”