Best 11 quotes of Louis Simpson on MyQuotes

All that grave weight of America Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome. The future in ruins!

Being shelled is the main work of an infantry soldier, which no one talks about. Everyone has his own way of going about it. In general, it means lying face down and contracting your body into as small a space as possible.

I gave no prescriptions, And those who have taken my moods for prophecies Mistake the matter.

In my grandmother's house there was always chicken soup And talk of the old country--mud and boards, Poverty, The snow falling down and necks of lovers.

It's complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time.

Paranoia imposes its own vision on the external world; it differs from other kinds of visionary experience in that the paranoid wants others to share his view—even insists on it. Paranoia is very like poetic creativity. This accounts for my fascination with certain people in whom this state of mind was evident: ‘characters’ met by chance, whose words and gestures would haunt me for years until, finally, in a poem I was able to dispel them.

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

The treasures of Cathay were never found. In this America, this wilderness Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound, The generations labor to possess And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out. Summers in your absence are as dark as a room. I have closed my arms again. They must do without. To knock at my heart is like knocking at a tomb. Do not write! Do not write. Let us learn to die, as best we may. Did I love you? Ask God. Ask yourself. Do you know? To hear that you love me, when you are far away, Is like hearing from heaven and never to go. Do not write! Do not write. I fear you. I fear to remember, For memory holds the voice I have often heard. To the one who cannot drink, do not show water, The beloved one's picture in the handwritten word. Do not write! Do not write those gentle words that I dare not see, It seems that your voice is spreading them on my heart, Across your smile, on fire, they appear to me, It seems that a kiss is printing them on my heart. Do not write!

These wars have been so great, they are forgotten Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed To wander through my brain four decades later As I have wandered in a dream through yours? The violence of waking life disrupts The order of our death. Strange dreams occur, For dreams are licensed as they never were.