Charles Simic famous quotes

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.
-- Charles Simic

#Levels #Consciousness

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

#Littles

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

#Thinking #Space #Gone

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

#Believe #Dark #Night

Silence is the only language god speaks.
-- Charles Simic

#Silence #Language #Speak

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

#Writing #Touching #Despair

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.
-- Charles Simic

#Howl #Packs

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

#Poetry #Silence #Never Quit

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

#People #Finding Happiness #Firsts

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

#Sight #Voyages #Invitations

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

#Night #Insomnia #Agency

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

#Dark #Shoes #Three

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.
-- Charles Simic

#Heart #Mirrors #Black

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

#Ambition #Imagination #Literature

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

#Writing #Want #Stones

The truth is dark under your eyelids.
-- Charles Simic

#Truth #Dark #Truth Is

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

#Art #America #Soul

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

#Bottles #Ships #Lighthouse

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

#Beautiful #Dream #Thinking

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

#Moving #Play #Chess

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

#Stars #Mind #Trying

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
-- Charles Simic

#Distance

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

#Children #Divorce #Class

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

#Firefighter #Poetry #Enough

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

#Self #Chance #Obsession

Poetry is an orphan of silence.
-- Charles Simic

#Silence #Orphan #Poetry Is

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

#Philosophical #Ideas #Seduction

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

#Color #People #Luck

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

#Believe #Writing #Heart

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

#Beautiful #Art #Needs

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.
-- Charles Simic

#Fall #Clouds #Sky

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.
-- Charles Simic

#Hands #Names #Space

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.
-- Charles Simic

#Dark #Silence #Age

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

#Summer #Making Love #Pages

There’s no preparation for poetry.
-- Charles Simic

#Preparation

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.
-- Charles Simic

#People #Decision #Born

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.
-- Charles Simic

#Beautiful #Fun #Believe