Charles Simic Quotes

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.

I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.

The truth is dark under your eyelids.

Silence is the only language god speaks.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

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.

Making art in America is about saving one's soul.

Only brooms Know the devil Still exists, That the snow grows whiter After a crow has flown over it

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

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

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.

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.

Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.

A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism participates.

To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.

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.

There’s no preparation for poetry.

When you play chess alone it's always your move.

The stars know everything, So we try to read their minds. As distant as they are, We choose to whisper in their presence.

The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

I love America, " he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.

Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.

The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.