Quotes from Charles Simic

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

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

There's no preparation for poetry.

Silence is the only language god speaks.

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

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

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

The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.

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

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

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'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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

MY SECRET IDENTITY IS The room is empty, And the window is open

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

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.

At some point my need for a solution was replaced by the poetry of my continuous failure.

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.