quotes by Charles Simic

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

"If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper."
— Charles Simic (The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems)

"Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket"
— Charles Simic

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


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— Charles Simic

"One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"Lyric poets are always corrupting the young, making them choke in self-pity and indulge in reverie. Dirty sex and direspect for authority is what they have been whispering into their ears for ages."
— Charles Simic

"He who cannot howl will not find his pack."
— Charles Simic

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

"Silence is the only language god speaks."
— Charles Simic (Dime-Store Alchemy)

"To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions."
— Charles Simic (Dime-Store Alchemy)

"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."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places."
— Charles Simic (Dime-Store Alchemy)

"A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

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

"Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
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— Charles Simic (Dime-Store Alchemy)

"Poetry is an orphan of silence."
— Charles Simic

"Many of our critics read literature like totalitarian cops on the lookout for subversive material -- for instance, the claim that there is a world outside language."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"Poetry tries to bridge the abyss lying between the name and the thing. That language is a problem is no news to poets."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"Most of our political writers on the left and the right are interchangeable. That's why it was child's play for so many liberals to become neoconservatives. What serenity the day one realizes that!"
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"Being is not an idea in philosophy, but a wordless experience we have from time to time."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)

"If Derrida is right, all that the poets have ever done is whistle in the dark."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)