Charles Simic Quotes - Page 2

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

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

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

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.

There’s no preparation for poetry.

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

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