39 Quotes by Simon Armitage

And wonder, dread and warhave lingered in that landwhere loss and love in turnhave held the upper hand.

Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.

The melancholy comes over me, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud.

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.

If I breathed the wordThat disappeared all peoplein the world,leaving the worldto the world, would yousay it? Would yousing it out loud?

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.

My God . . . that grinding is a greeting.My arrival is honored with the honing of an axe

Occasionally it's been a long and bumpy road - one I'm still travelling - but I've always felt like my home town has been solidly behind me and I'm both grateful and proud.

I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.