Charles Simic Quotes

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

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

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Silence is the only language god speaks.

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.

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.

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

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 you play chess alone it's always your move.

The truth is dark under your eyelids.

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!

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