Charles Simic Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Charles Simic

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

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. — Charles Simic

If the photographers are soul-thieves, whose soul is being stolen in a photograph of the night sky? The soul of the last one to go to bed and the soul of the first one to rise in the morning, perhaps? Photography is a black art like alchemy. It turns matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Still, there are moments when looking at a photograph of a night sky we have a hunch what the word soul means, what the word infinity encompasses. — Charles Simic

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

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird's foot
Worn around the cannibal's neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind. — Charles Simic

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

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. — Charles Simic

The Prodigal

Dark morning rain
Meant to fall
On a prison and a schoolyard,
Falling meanwhile
On my mother and her old dog.

How slow she shuffles now
In my father's Sunday shoes.
The dog by her side
Trembling with each step
As he tries to keep up.

I am on another corner waiting
With my head shaved.
My mind hops like a sparrow
In the rain.
I'm always watching and worrying about her.

Everything is a magic ritual,
A secret cinema,
The way she appears in a window hours later
To set the empty bowl
And spoon on the table,
And then exits
So that the day may pass,
And the night may fall
Into the empty bowl,
Empty room, empty house,
While the rain keeps
Knocking at the front door. — Charles Simic

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

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. — Charles Simic

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. — Charles Simic

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

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

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

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

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

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist. — Charles Simic

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time. — Charles Simic

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

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. — Charles Simic

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless. — Charles Simic

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

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. — Charles Simic

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

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish. — Charles Simic

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

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

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

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

Poetry is an orphan of silence. — Charles Simic

In the circle of yellow lamplight,
These few roof-beams and columns
Of what could be a Mogul Emperor's palace.
The Prince chews his long nails,
The Princess lowers her green eyelids.
They both smoke too much,
Never go to bed before daybreak. — Charles Simic

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

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. — Charles Simic

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

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

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

In the Library"

for Octavio


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.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does. — Charles Simic

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 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

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 — Charles Simic

Most of the American films were made in southern California, so if you were in Europe, watching those palm trees swaying in the wind with someone like Rita Hayworth gliding underneath them in a white convertible, you got all kinds of wonderfully wrong ideas about the place. — Charles Simic

There's no preparation for poetry. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Charles Simic

On this Very Street in Belgrade
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst. — 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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

Eyes Fastened With Pins"

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed. — Charles Simic

Are Russian cannibals worse than the English? Of course. The English eat only the feet, the Russians the soul. "The soul is a mirage," I told Anna Alexandrovna, but she went on eating mine anyway. — Charles Simic

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

Silence is the only language god speaks. — Charles Simic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Something"

Here come my night thoughts
On crutches,
Returning from studying the heavens.
What they thought about
Stayed the same,
Stayed immense and incomprehensible.

My mother and father smile at each other
Knowingly above the mantel.
The cat sleeps on, the dog
Growls in his sleep.
The stove is cold and so is the bed.

Now there are only these crutches
To contend with.
Go ahead and laugh, while I raise one
With difficulty,
Swaying on the front porch,
While pointing at something
In the gray distance.

You see nothing, eh?
Neither do I, Mr. Milkman.
I better hit you once or twice over the head
With this fine old prop,
So you don't go off muttering

I saw something! — Charles Simic

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

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

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

MY SECRET IDENTITY IS

The room is empty,
And the window is open — Charles Simic

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

Because the light is always with us
and the hush of an early morning
time propitious to plain speech
space between the premonition
and the event
the small lovely realm
of the possible. — Charles Simic

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