Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Some of us want to return to the womb and some of us want to be God; but everybody wants to die.

I was a prisoner there for many years; from my cell I could see nothing but the sky. In its midst hung an immense luminous globe, a sun; which, in the midst of the darkness, alone as I was, I worshipped. One morning it was gone; and I questioned my jailer, who smiled as he answered: “It is only a street lamp the municipal authorities have removed.” I laughed with him at my stupidity; and indeed, it had lit nothing, not even a blind man could have taken it for more than a street lamp. I repeated to myself what I had known always: “I am alone in the darkness...” But when I closed my eyes I could see it as plainly as ever: and to me it was the sun.

No one’s memory is as bad as he has wished it.

The people in Hell say nothing but “What?”

I killed your cat because she ate my cow.

The cricket is always waiting for a rich ant to die.

It is better to be a live ant than a dead cricket; or so the ants say.

What you don’t know, name.
 
Scratch a doctor and find a patient.

‘Remember, no two pebbles are alike,’ a pebble told me. And I remembered; but it was more than I could do to care.

What I am few care, and no one knows.

When you buy bonds to leave your children, remember to pick out the ones with the prettiest engravings.

When St. Anthony died he was more ascetic than ever.

How, said my friend, I have spoken contemptuously of our sentimental humanitarianism, of our childish and Victorian belief in ‘progress’. Yet when the bombers came I could take no pleasure in them.

About all our possessions we are reduced to saying, in the end: Enough. It is mine.

We always bring back more than we bargained for.

Happiness is a disease of perception; the only one for which there is a cure on every corner.

You can make a million selling oilshares but you will spend it all for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Rich people can waste their lives and their money.

The goose said to her daughter, “You are a perfect goose!”

The fool wishes to be a wise fool.

Cynicism is the aphorist’s suet.

Beauty was too used to the Beast ever to be entirely satisfied with the prince, the consciousness of her virtue and the appreciation of her position; and the prince had been a Beast long enough and the Beast had been a Beast too long not to be disconcerted at reverting to the condition of a prince. He looked at himself with dismay. “I should have liked to be a little less shaggy,” he thought, “certainly I could have done with shorter teeth; but for this life has simply not prepared me.”

You get to know another person exactly as you get to know how to walk a tightrope.

You don’t marry another person, you marry another world.

We marry because we have illusions and remain married because we have lost them.

I married you; I am not divorcing you; I am divorcing your aunt, the rector, and the cat.
 
When I was divorced I thought to myself, like a character in a novel, “I have married and divorced a stranger”; but I had retained so little of my former interest that it pleased me not to be burdened with any better knowledge.
 
Free me and I hate you.

I will die for you, but I won’t let you leave me.

Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.

Wanting to die is worse than dying.

Die and your bones yawn.

When a man dies the stones on his drive and the shingles in his roof are glad.

The figure never lasts as long as the ground, but who cares? Except the ground?

How well we all die!

Of two people, one is always the older.

Curare: the surgeon’s idea of an anaesthetic.

Preaches discovered sin just as Columbus discovered syphilis.

Thoughts are pleasanter in their dismissal.

Geometers dream about snow.

Bad reasons? There are none.

No one ever loses his temper without a good excuse.

Don’t argue.

Look and cry.

In the end even crying is no good, either.

All of us cry at the movies, but who knows at what we are weeping?

Dew is no more useless, perishable, and beautiful than innocence.

Whoever had too much sleep?

When the world has blown us up long enough, we can think of nothing but to burst.

People talk about you less than you think, and worse, too.

An ounce of prevention: simply amounts to, Don’t do anything at all.

Heaven is the purgatory of the angels; they worry all the time.

God is like the government, in debt to everybody.

If God had meant us to be good he could have made us so.

Pure being is what we really expect of the unemployed.

Everyone has a dead man’s job or is waiting for one.

You die for someone else’s country, not your own.

‘Each of these men is someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s husband,’ said the general. ‘That is what you must not allow yourself to remember.’

The tortoise called the hare a Bolshevik and the snail a shell-bound reactionary, and his wife said that he was another Aristotle.

The oyster wanted to fly by flapping his shells.

The lion said that he had such big teeth so that the cattle wouldn’t mistake him for a chrysanthemum and eat [him].

The fly thinks that he is in love with the flypaper.

Traps have an attraction for mice which not even cheese can destroy.

R[ed Riding] H[ood’s] grandmother turned out to be a wolf.

England is as much a heuristic fiction, an agreement of cells, as John Bull, and so are you yourself as either.

Had we been Alexander we should have struggled with the Gordian knot for 60 or 70 years before it was cut for us.

There is a key with which we beat down every door.

A. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Q. Precisely. A poor thing but mine own.

Being resembled is bad enough; to resemble is intolerable.

When you talk down you convert audience, doctrine and yourself. (And when you talk to anybody but yourself, you’re talking down, perhaps.)

A proverb with one meaning, a cat with one eye.

Books are the strangers’ dead.

There are two poets in Patagonia, the better named Wilkinson; the Patagonians call Shakespeare the English Wilkinson.

In poetry tradition is the solution to most of our problems; but it is only by solving these problems that we can understand what tradition is.

Only in the form of irony can the deepest things be uttered, for they lie always outside morality; moreover truth is always ambivalent, both sides are true.

Scientists used to think light a wave-motion in the ether; but when they found that ether had 39 contradictory properties, they decided that light is a wave-motion.

No two kisses are alike.

I want to marry the round-square.

Love? How? So much information on so little knowledge; and even the knowledge, most of it, knowledge of the knower; but no knowledge is so precious in our eyes.

Much love or none makes mercy.

Even the most violent statement against love never seems one-sided; writers[,] readers[,] always see implicit in it its corollary, “But it’s still better than anything.”

What we deserve is asked for and resented like advice.

When we ask for justice we wish, and the world knows that we wish, only for mercy, almost the greatest imaginable indulgence. Yet somewhere deep in us there is some shuddering center that really wishes what we have lied.