Top 69 Charles Simic Quotes
#1. MY SECRET IDENTITY IS
The room is empty,
And the window is open
Charles Simic
#2. If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.
Charles Simic
#3. The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.
Charles Simic
#4. There are people who live inside their heads and their intellects. It's something one is born with and stuck with. It's not something you make a decision about.
Charles Simic
#5. The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
Charles Simic
#6. In the circle of yellow lamplight,
These few roof-beams and columns
Of what could be a Mogul Emperor's palace.
The Prince chews his long nails,
The Princess lowers her green eyelids.
They both smoke too much,
Never go to bed before daybreak.
Charles Simic
#7. Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.
Charles Simic
#8. Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul. "The soul is a mirage," I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway.
Charles Simic
#9. A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.
Charles Simic
#10. The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.
Charles Simic
#11. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!
Charles Simic
#12. Inside is where we meet everyone else; it's on the outside that we are truly alone.
Charles Simic
#13. One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Charles Simic
#14. The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.
Charles Simic
#15. Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.
Charles Simic
#17. It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.
Charles Simic
#18. Because the light is always with us
and the hush of an early morning
time propitious to plain speech
space between the premonition
and the event
the small lovely realm
of the possible.
Charles Simic
#22. In the dark to see, you ass-scratchers! In the dark to see.
Charles Simic
#23. Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
Charles Simic
#24. I love America," he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.
Charles Simic
#25. Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.
Charles Simic
#26. A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.
Charles Simic
#27. The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.
Charles Simic
#28. There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
There's a woden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean
a river dried to its bed
Charles Simic
#29. Only brooms
Know the devil
Still exists,
That the snow grows whiter
After a crow has flown over it
Charles Simic
#30. Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful...
Charles Simic
#31. If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.
Charles Simic
#32. In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
Charles Simic
#33. Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket
Charles Simic
#34. When you play chess alone it's always your move.
Charles Simic
#35. It is the desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath as one says that there is no god.
Charles Simic
#36. Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.
Charles Simic
#37. To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.
Charles Simic
#38. I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.
Charles Simic
#39. Thoreau loved ants. He'd meet one in the morning and spend the whole day talking to him.
Charles Simic
#40. I'm not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I'm against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.
Charles Simic
#42. Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.
Charles Simic
#43. When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.
Charles Simic
#44. I could never free myself from the thought that Nature is that which is slowly killing me.
Charles Simic
#45. I remember," someone said, "how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content.
Charles Simic
#46. Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.
Charles Simic
#47. Time - the lizard in the sunlight. It doesn't move, but its eyes are wide open.
Charles Simic
#48. Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.
Charles Simic
#49. Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Charles Simic
#50. Nationalism is a self-constructed cage in which family members can huddle in safety when they're not growling and barking at someone outside the cage.
Charles Simic
#51. Making art in America is about saving one's soul.
Charles Simic
#52. The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.
Charles Simic
#53. Most of the American films were made in southern California, so if you were in Europe, watching those palm trees swaying in the wind with someone like Rita Hayworth gliding underneath them in a white convertible, you got all kinds of wonderfully wrong ideas about the place.
Charles Simic
#54. Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
Charles Simic
#55. I insist on remaining aloof, self-absorbed, lovingly nursing my suspicions.
Charles Simic
#56. The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.
Charles Simic
#57. We name one thing and then another. That's how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there's a lot of space inside words.
Charles Simic
#58. A poem is an instant of lucidity in which
the entire organism participates.
Charles Simic
#59. For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
Charles Simic
#61. While you sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.
Charles Simic
#62. The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.
Charles Simic
#63. Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.
Charles Simic
#64. A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.
Charles Simic
#65. Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.
Charles Simic
#66. I left parts of myself everywhere,
The way absent-minded people leave
Gloves and umbrellas
Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck
Charles Simic
#67. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp's "Fountain"-urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.
Charles Simic
#68. At some point my need for a solution was replaced by the poetry of my continuous failure.
Charles Simic
#69. Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk".
Charles Simic
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