Simon Armitage Quotes

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.

I feel like 'Harlem River' was me putting one foot out the door of New York, and 'Still Life' is between Point A and Point B. It's the grey area.

I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.

There is no place so AWAKE and ALIVE as the edge of becoming.

The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.

I'm a dweller of the threshold and I'm waiting at the door, and I'm standing in the darkness, I don't want to wait no more.

Janie blinks and leans against the wall, just in case. But it's no one's dream. It's just the end of some things. And the beginning of others.

live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.

A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

Change brings opportunities. On the other hand, change can be confusing.

Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

It's a liminal thing, humming, And I'm always interested in liminal things.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

I remember once when we were moving, driving across country, and it was raining so hard, the windshield wipers going fast and squeaking, and then: nothing. It stopped. I looked out the window ahead of me and it was clear. I looked out the back and there was the rain, still going. Nobody said anything, but there it was, a near miracle, a rain line, a way of seeing just where something starts, when usually you are just in the middle of it before you notice it. That's how it feels to me now, to not want to be like (that) anymore. I see the line.

Never being, but always at the edge of Being.

He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.

The threshold is the place of expectation.

Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

The limiting surface of one thing is the beginning of another.

We stand on the threshold of a twilight-whether morning or evening we do not know. One is followed by the night, the other heralds the dawn.