The Life of Images Quotes

“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

“Nationalism is a self-constructed cage in which family members can huddle in safety when they’re not growling and barking at someone outside the cage.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective

“Everyone vain, dull, peevish, and sexually frustrated dreams of legislating his impotence. Mao’s uniforms: a billion people dressing the same and shouting from his little red book continues to be the secret hope of new visionaries.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective

“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.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective

“Did she believe in God? Yes and no. God is the cunning of all these boxes fitting inside each other, perhaps? More likely, God is just another box. Neither the tiniest one nor the biggest imaginable. There are boxes even God knows nothing of.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective

“To be conscious is already to be divided, to be multiple.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective

“Here’s what Nietzsche said to the ceiling: “The rank of the philosopher is determined by the rank of his laughter.” But he couldn’t really laugh.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective