Walking Home Quotes

“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

“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

“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