Simon Armitage

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

"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"

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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..."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."