Charles Simic

“Lyric poets are always corrupting the young, making them choke in self-pity and indulge in reverie. Dirty sex and direspect for authority…

— 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,…

— Charles Simic

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

— 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…

— Charles Simic

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

— 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…

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

“The Something" Here come my night thoughts On crutches, Returning from studying the heavens. What they thought about Stayed the same, Stayed…

— Charles Simic

There are knives that glitter like altars In a dark church Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile To be healed.…

— Charles Simic

“هندوانه بودای سبز بر پیشخوان میوه فروش لبخندش را گاز میزنیم و دندانهایش را تف میکنیم :: Watermelons Green Buddhas On the fruit stand. We eat the smile And spit out the teeth.”

— Charles Simic

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

— 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

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…

— Charles Simic

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing…

— Charles Simic

“On this Very Street in Belgrade" Your mother carried you Out of the smoking ruins of a building And set you down…

— 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

I do believe that a poem needs to remind the reader of his or her own humanity, of what they are, of…

— 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,…

— Charles Simic

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

— Charles Simic

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

— Charles Simic

A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and…

— Charles Simic

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and…

— Charles Simic

“While you sit Like a rain puddle in hell Knitting the socks Of your life.”

— Charles Simic

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

— Charles Simic