Charles Simic quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Simic

Charles Simic Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Charles Simic on Wise Famous Quotes.

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

In the dark to see, you ass-scratchers! In the dark to see.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Time - the lizard in the sunlight. It doesn't move, but its eyes are wide open.

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

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.

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

While you sit
Like a rain puddle in hell
Knitting the socks
Of your life.

It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Thoreau loved ants. He'd meet one in the morning and spend the whole day talking to him.

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.

MY SECRET IDENTITY IS

The room is empty,
And the window is open

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

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

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.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

At some point my need for a solution was replaced by the poetry of my continuous failure.

I could never free myself from the thought that Nature is that which is slowly killing me.

There's no preparation for poetry.

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

Silence is the only language god speaks.

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

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

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

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

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

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

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

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

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

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

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

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

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

I insist on remaining aloof, self-absorbed, lovingly nursing my suspicions.

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

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

Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful...

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

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