Quotes from 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...

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

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

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.

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.

And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.

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

It's never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it's kind of unkillable, poetry. It's our most ancient artform and I think it's more relevant today than ever, because it's one person saying what they really believe.

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

the kind of music that God must hearing, no matter how busy or distracted, because it comes out of hundreds of square Miles of nothingness, out of the emptiness of the hills and the silence of the moors ...

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

God help us both if this is summer. The sun shines all day and all night but it has no warmth, no light, no colour.

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.

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.

I once swallowed my difference without water on an empty stomach.

Brace and be brisk, commoner, carry your heart like an egg on a spoon, be fleet through the concourse, primed for that point in time when the world goes bust

you get up one day and somebody has taken one of the mountains away

A woman plays the Northumberland pipes; from where I'm sitting, on a wall at the back, it looks like she's giving physiotherapy to a small marsupial wearing callipers and smoking a bong, but the sound is haunting and hypnotic, mournful and melodic at the same time, every note somehow harmonising with the low, droning purr.

If I breathed the word That disappeared all people in the world, leaving the world to the world, would you say it? Would you sing it out loud?

I'm on page 12 of 80 of Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus: Waves were never the tide but ripples, spawned by moon-coloured ships of war.

They said we probably wouldn't be let back into Canada, suggesting we'd just have to live forever on the bridge, cadging fruit and peanuts from passing motorists and drinking the spray thrown up by the mighty falls, but the guard at the north end just smiled and waved us through.

The wise have noted more than once that he who argues with a dunce might just as well compare his jaw against an oven's yawning door. And now a saying comes to mind, a proverb that King Alfred coined: "Be careful not to waste your life where strife & quarrelling are rife; keep well away from fractious fools.

If Beauty called it didn't stay, & Virtue looked the other way. Another charge that I will file: your habits, like your looks, are vile.