Charles Simic > Quotes

“Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.”
― Charles Simic

“He who cannot howl will not find his pack.”
― Charles Simic

“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

“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

“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”
― Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs

“If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.”
― Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems

“Silence is the only language god speaks.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

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

“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, The World Doesn't End

“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

“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

“Poetry is an orphan of silence.”
― Charles Simic

“When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.”
― Charles Simic

“Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket”
― Charles Simic

“Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.”
― Charles Simic

“The truth is dark under your eyelids.
What are you going to do about it?
The birds are silent; there's no one to ask.
All day long you'll squint at the gray sky.
When the wind blows you'll shiver like straw.

A meek little lamb you grew your wool
Till they came after you with huge shears.
Flies hovered over open mouth,
Then they, too, flew off like the leaves,
The bare branches reached after them in vain.

Winter coming. Like the last heroic soldier
Of a defeated army, you'll stay at your post,
Head bared to the first snow flake.
Till a neighbor comes to yell at you,
You're crazier than the weather, Charlie.”
― Charles Simic

“While you sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.”
― Charles Simic

“Making art in America is about saving one's soul.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“There’s a book called
“A Dictionary of Angels.”
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.”
― Charles Simic, Sixty Poems

“Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.”
― Charles Simic

“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

“«ظلُّنا واحدٌ.
لكن ظلُّ مَنْ منّا؟
أودّ أن أقول:
«لقد كان في البداية
وسيكون عند النهاية»،
لكن لا يقين في ذلك.
ليلا
بينما أجلس
خالطا أوراق صمتنا،
أقول له:
«مع أنّك تلفظ كلّ واحدة من كلماتي،
فأنت غريبٌ
آن لك أنْ تتكلم».”
― Charles Simic, العودة إلى مكان مضاء بكوب حليب

“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, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs

“When you play chess alone it's always your move.”
― Charles Simic, Jackstraws: Poems

“The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine… While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you’re making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might’ve thrown them out with last spring’s cleaning.

It’s snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing.”
― Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End

“To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.”
― Charles Simic

“Sleeplessness is like metaphysics. Be there.”
― Charles Simic