ৡ⃪evie

“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.”
― Charles Simic, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

“If the photographers are soul-thieves, whose soul is being stolen in a photograph of the night sky? The soul of the last one to go to bed and the soul of the first one to rise in the morning, perhaps? Photography is a black art like alchemy. It turns matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Still, there are moments when looking at a photograph of a night sky we have a hunch what the word soul means, what the word infinity encompasses.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective

“The sponge looks within and sees only the ocean of God. The sponge looks without and sees only the ocean of God, but not all of the ocean of God is within the sponge.”
― Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

“The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its original strangeness.”
― Charles Simic