Simon Armitage > Quotes

“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, The Death of King Arthur: A New Verse Translation

“And wonder, dread and war
have lingered in that land
where loss and love in turn
have held the upper hand.”
― Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

“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

“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.”
― Simon Armitage

“Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.
Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.”
― Simon Armitage, The Death of King Arthur: A New Verse Translation

“...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 ...”
― Simon Armitage

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, Kid

“My God . . . that grinding is a greeting.
My arrival is honored with the honing of an axe”
― Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

“Then red fur rips--Reynard
out of his pelt is prised.”
― Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

“you get up one day and somebody has taken one of the mountains away”
― Simon Armitage

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

“And [Gawain] constantly enquires of those he encounters / if they know, or not, in this neck of the woods, / of a great green man or a green chapel. / No, they say, never. Never in their lives. / They know of neither a chap nor a chapel / so strange.”
― Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

“Those bastards in their mansions:
to hear them shriek, you'd think
I'd poisoned the dogs and vaulted the ditches,
crossed the lawns in stocking feet and threadbare britches,
forced the door of one of the porches, and lifted
the gift of fire from the burning torches,

then given heat and light to streets and houses,
told the people how to ditch their cuffs and shackles,
armed them with the iron from their wrists and ankles.

Those lords and ladies in their palaces and castles,
they'd have me sniffed out by their beagles,
picked at by their eagles, pinned down, grilled
beneath the sun,

Me, I stick to the shadows, carry a gun.”
― Simon Armitage, Book of Matches

“And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered her the one time that she lied.
And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn't spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.

Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.”
― Simon Armitage

“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”
― Simon Armitage, Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, The Owl and the Nightingale

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, The Owl and the Nightingale

“Through pity, then, I can't resist
delivering a song of bliss
when witnessing the painful trace
that love leaves in a young girl's face.
I try to teach them, through my song,
love of that kind will not last long,
because, just as my song relents,
love rarely stays when it descends
on children's hearts, but meets its death
the way that warmth fades on our breath.”
― Simon Armitage, The Owl and the Nightingale

“Who speaks well ... fights well,' goes the song;
she'd wage war with her voice instead.
'To fight well, speak well,' Alfred said.”
― Simon Armitage, The Owl and the Nightingale

“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?”
― Simon Armitage

“I once swallowed my difference without water on an empty stomach.”
― Simon Armitage, Seeing Stars

“Beck:
It is all one chase.
Trace it back the source
might be nothing more than a teardrop
squeezed from a Curlew’s eye,
then follow it down to the full-throated roar
at its mouth - a dipper strolls the river
dressed for dinner in a white bib.
The unbroken thread of the beck
with its nose for the sea
all flux and flex, soft-soaping a pebble
for thousands of years, or here
after hard rain, sawing the hillside in half
with its chain. Or here, where water unbinds
and hangs at the waterfall’s face, and
just for that one, stretched white moment
becomes lace.”
― Simon Armitage

“November

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.

You check her towel. soap and family trinkets,
pare her nails, parcel her in the rough blankets
and she sinks down into her incontinence.

It is time John. In their pasty bloodless smiles,
in their slack breasts, their stunned brains and their baldness
and in us John: we are almost these monsters.

You're shattered. You give me the keys and I drive
through the twilight zone, past the famous station
to your house, to numb ourselves with alcohol.

Inside, we feel the terror of the dusk begin.
Outside we watch the evening, failing again,
and we let it happen. We can say nothing.

Sometimes the sun spangles and we feel alive.
One thing we have to get, John, out of this life.”
― Simon Armitage

“I am very bothered when I think
of the bad things I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
and played the handles
in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;
then called your name, and handed them over.

O the unrivalled stench of branded skin
as you slipped your thumb and middle finger in,
then couldn’t shake off the two burning rings. Marked,
the doctor said, for eternity.

Don’t believe me, please, if I say
that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,
of asking you if you would marry me."
— I Am Very Bothered”
― Simon Armitage, Book of Matches

“The shout

We went out
into the school yard together, me and the boy
whose name and face

I don't remember. We were testing the range
of the human voice:
he had to shout for all he was worth

I had to raise and arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park - I lifted an arm.
Out of bounds,
he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,
from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm -
I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
with a gunshot hole
in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia

Boy with the name and face I don't remember,
you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.”
― Simon Armitage

“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.”
― Simon Armitage, Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid