Charles Simic Quotes

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.

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

Memory, all-night's bedside tattoo artist.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Sleeplessness is like metaphysics. Be there.
-Charles Simic

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

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.

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History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen.

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.

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.

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, 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".

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

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

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

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.

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.

And of course, for all we know, I might be a hundred years old already, and she just a sleepy little girl with glasses.

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

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

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

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!

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

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

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

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

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

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

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.

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink of a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opned our mouths and they heard the accent?

The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take; then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.

MY SECRET IDENTITY IS

The room is empty,
And the window is open

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

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.

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.

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