Best 51 quotes of Charles Simic on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

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.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

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.

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

I do believe that a poem needs to remind the reader of his or her own humanity, of what they are, of what they're capable of. Awaken them, in a sense, to the fact that there's a world in front of their eyes, that they have a body, they're going to die, the sky is beautiful, it's fun to be in a grassy field when the sun is shining—those kinds of things.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

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

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.

Silence is the only language god speaks.

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

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.

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

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.

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

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.

The truth is dark under your eyelids.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

Filosóficamente no puede confiarse en los ojos.

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

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink of a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opned our mouths and they heard the accent? The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take; then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.

Inside is where we meet everyone else; it's on the outside that we are truly alone.

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

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.

Not the least charm of this tableau is that it can be so easily dismissed as preposterous.

Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. “Doubt nothing, believe everything,” was my friend’s idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. 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! My friend’s empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.

Tending a cliff-hanging Grand Hotel In a country ravaged by civil war. My heart as its only bellhop. My brain as its Chinese cook.

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