Charles Simic quotes:

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.

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.

Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.

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

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

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships."

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

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

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.

I left parts of myself everywhere, The way absent-minded people leave Gloves and umbrellas Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck

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

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

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

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

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

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

I'm not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I'm against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.

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!

Silence is the only language god speaks.

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

The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.

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

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

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

The truth is dark under your eyelids.

I slept little, read a lot, and fell in love frequently.

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

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

There are people who live inside their heads and their intellects. It's something one is born with and stuck with. It's not something you make a decision about.

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