This misfortune you find is of your own manufacture.

The ordinary can be absolutely miraculous.

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

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.

We still need a voice that thinks before it speaks.

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

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

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

The Huddersfield that I like best is a large town with a big heart and an open mind.

I wondered if people might not have had enough of Simon Armitage and wondered whether I hadn't had enough of Simon Armitage.

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.

You have to be smart to get what you want.

Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best.

I do not know when I am more perfectly happy than when I am weeping for sin at the foot of the cross.

No matter how lost a person is, they still draw on their body. So the body would be more like the motor.

No woman can be completely happy at any one moment in time. They're always anticipating the next thing to argue or complain about.

I love sport, I grew up playing sports, that's all I did, and it is so invigorating now that I'm supposedly adult to learn something completely new, from the bottom up.

When love exists, nothing else matters, not life’s predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity.

I'm just some lunatic macaroni mushroom, is that it?

Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.

Money lending is a horrible profession. If we are to call it otherwise it is lawful plundering.