Charles Simic Quotes

34 quotes in 497 categories

• 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.
• Making art in America is about saving one's soul.
• I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.
• The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.
• 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…
• The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.
• 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…
• There’s no preparation for poetry.
• Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.
• 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…
• 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…
• Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
• If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.
• If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.
• A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.
• Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
• When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.
• He who cannot howl will not find his pack.
• 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…

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